Chapter 1
Notes:
The city guard in Calimport are called the amlakkar. Calimport is divided into wards; the novel never says where the Basadoni Guild is, so I put it in Khanduq Ward. Psionic magic doesn't work like this, but I had fun spelunking in the Expanded Psionics Handbook for ideas.
Chapter Text
Night has fallen in Calimport. At the top of the stair, Kimmuriel waits, and listens.
“—least twenty-two. Not including a quite determined effort to blow up our Clawrift headquarters with smokepowder, which wasn’t personal.”
“Of course.”
“I think of it as a compliment, really. Except the shirt treated with venom I was gifted by a matron mother, oh, years ago. That, I found rather insulting—it was terribly ugly.”
The two figures are speaking Drow, one haltingly. The room is shadowed. A lamp burns in one corner.
Jarlaxle’s posture is relaxed and open, his arm laid across the back of the divan. His head is cocked, his visible eye bright with interest. He is looking at a human. “If it had been meant for me,” he says, “well, I’d simply have Ediri put another tally on the wall in the mess hall—number twenty-three, another failure, the men would get a good laugh out of it. Far more novel, I think, to try to assassinate an assassin. One has to admire the gall, if nothing else.”
“‘Gall’ is one word.”
“And ‘stupidity’ is another—quite. Generously, we might call it brave, and rather stupid.”
“Alternatively,” says Artemis Entreri, “a death wish.”
Entreri stands on his own shadow, an abstraction of dark, sharp shapes. Kimmuriel can see his face; the outline of his mind. Jarlaxle’s loathsome new creature.
“So,” Jarlaxle says. “What was it?”
“We call it zamikh.” Entreri holds up a glass phial. The fluid inside is red, but darker and thinner than blood. “Known across the majority of the continent as ‘arsenic’.”
“Is it magical?”
“Derived from mundane ores.” Entreri steps close enough to place it in Jarlaxle’s open hand. “The powder will dissolve in any liquid with no discernible colour, smell, or taste. It was put in the wine.”
Jarlaxle tips the phial. The liquid slants. “Yes, it’s quite invisible. What kind of poison is it?”
In closing the gap, their voices have lowered. Kimmuriel strains to hear.
“Uncommon,” Entreri says, “and efficient. The kind an assassin would use.”
“And it would kill someone of your size, in this concentration?”
“One of Basadoni’s servants is being carted off to a graveplot as we speak. Apparently he was thirsty.”
“Well, well,” Jarlaxle says. “They meant to be decisive, at least.”
“They meant—”
Entreri pauses. He turns his head toward the stair, listening. His eyes search, and stop where Kimmuriel is concealed.
In the moment before Entreri reacts, they stare at each other. The human’s eyes look black. Kimmuriel hears, quietly: I see you.
Serene with anger, Kimmuriel steps around the pillar and says, “You sent for me?”
“Ah, Kimmuriel.” Jarlaxle tilts up his face, smiling. “Thank you for coming so promptly. Yes—do come in. No need to linger on the stair.” His smile tucks into his cheek.
The room is open to the night, the hot and still air. Kimmuriel's skin feels humid. A fine sweat pricks up on his spine.
Below the tower, Calimport sprawls in every direction. A labyrinth—brown, filthy and vast. There are golden domes, glazed minarets, gardens and spiked trees; but most of the city is low and huddled, slum streets and mud huts, market squares piled with ferric dust. Thousands of lights breed on it like a pestilence.
It is the first surface city Kimmuriel has seen. To call it hellish would be too generous.
Most appalling is the sound. A million humans labour and squabble and copulate within Calimport’s mud-brick walls, and the noisome racket of their minds—hissing, gibbering—would drive a lesser psion mad. As it is, Kimmuriel can barely keep it out; it is like fingers pressing at his brain. He knew little Common when he arrived, but he has been dreaming in it for a tenday.
The tower room, however, is a strange region of quiet. Jarlaxle's mind is hidden by his eyepatch, which he never goes without in Kimmuriel’s presence. Entreri is almost as silent, a murmur just out of earshot. There is no device or spell about him that Kimmuriel can detect, nothing that would help him to hide. Entreri is superbly disciplined, or he is dull-witted and empty. The latter seems more probable.
Jarlaxle drums his fingernails on the divan’s arm. “Is Rai’gy still in Ched Nasad?”
“Due to return within the hour.”
“What news here?”
“Only what is not news,” Kimmuriel says. “The ward is boiling over. Skirmishes are breaking out hourly on our territorial borders. And the amlakkar posted in this sabban continue to pry where they should not. I was in the middle of an interrogation when your messenger blundered in.”
He was pleased to be interrupted, in truth. The weeping was dreary.
“Oh? Anything of use?”
“Gibberish. What is this about?”
Jarlaxle holds up the phial. “Arsenic, apparently.”
Entreri says, “Someone attempted to poison me.”
A month has passed since the coup. With the Basadoni Guild under their command and lines of supply established, they have already sent thousands in gold back to Bregan D’aerthe’s vaults. Lucrative even beyond my expectations, Jarlaxle told him.
Yet the political situation in Khanduq Ward grows only more vexed, and their position more precarious. An assassination attempt is not a surprise. Indeed, Kimmuriel understands the desire to murder the creature in question. He shares it.
“You’re certain it was meant for you,” Jarlaxle says.
Entreri nods. “The poison was left in the pasha's rooms. And it’s well known that Basadoni didn’t drink alcohol.”
Kimmuriel absorbs that, but when he speaks it is to Jarlaxle only. “Why have you summoned me, then?”
Jarlaxle closes his fingers around the phial. “Have you noticed anything significant among the humans? Signs of defection or disloyalty—anything untoward?”
“You're quick to exclude your own people,” Entreri says.
Jarlaxle’s smile slants. “If ours had decided to kill you, you’d be quite dead, I assure you that.” His gaze flicks back to Kimmuriel.
“No,” Kimmuriel says, taking up the question. “But I have endeavoured to shut them out. Humans make an unspeakable racket.” Entreri does not react to that. “Nonetheless, the perpetrator would be easy to identify—the motive is obvious, is it not? Retaliation, for your human’s rash actions.”
On the night of the coup, Entreri committed one decisive, senseless act—he killed the guildmaster. Pasha Basadoni might have been a useful puppet: a figurehead fading in his old age, fit only for pleasantries and formal visits. Instead, his body is in a casket in the sub-basement and his death has been concealed with planted rumours and illusions, out of concern for what it might provoke. The only person pleased by this outcome is Jarlaxle, who delighted in giving Entreri a title he did not want and for which he is ill-suited.
It seems that Entreri’s only skill, aside from killing, is making enemies.
“The Rakers are known for assassinations with arsenic.” Even Entreri’s eyes are inconvenient: cool and shrewd, as he watches the phial turn over and over in Jarlaxle’s hand. “They import it from Neverwinter.”
Jarlaxle tilts his head. “Conspiracy with the Rakers? That would be—regrettable.”
A touch of sarcasm. Jarlaxle would like nothing better than a reason to snuff the Rakers out. In time, he may not even require that.
“With a Raker,” Entreri interjects. “The guild collectively wouldn’t strike at us in the middle of negotiations—not with so much coin on the table.”
When the terms of the trade deal were first proposed, Kimmuriel at last understood Jarlaxle’s interest in Calimport. Even with the Rakers’ cut, the estimated profits for the first month are five times what they would make in Menzoberranzan in half a year.
“Unless it was a test,” Jarlaxle says. “If, as Kimmuriel claims, they’ve learned that Basadoni is dead—”
“They wouldn’t be this clumsy.”
“Well, it seems someone wishes to sabotage any possibility of a trade arrangement. What then?”
“If the negotiations fail?” Entreri looks grim. “It will be war, I expect.”
Kimmuriel stiffens. Open conflict would tear up any hope of secrecy; and if they are exposed the humans will unite against them—rout them from the guildhouse, hunt them through the underground, besiege them on every side, like vermin. “If that is so,” he says, “we should deal with this saboteur quickly.”
Jarlaxle looks placid and amused. “Yes, I thought you might say as much. Fortunately, I have—this.”
The crystal shard lies in his hand. That dark, venomous green.
Kimmuriel has not seen the shard since the debacle with Drizzt Do’Urden, but he has been aware of it. The secret party to their discussions, the unaccountable whisper in Jarlaxle’s ear. Now, he watches Jarlaxle’s eyes grow strange and preoccupied, and thinks it bodes ill.
“With this, it’ll be trivial to scour the guild for the culprit,” Jarlaxle says. “An efficient solution, and—”
“No.”
Entreri’s voice is like a whipcrack. Jarlaxle looks up.
“No?”
“They're already agitated,” Entreri says, and now Kimmuriel can hear his mind: brittle, like glass crunching underfoot. Most of Jarlaxle's subordinates would rather chew out their tongues than disagree with him. “Using that to interrogate them will only incite them further.”
“They won’t even be aware of it.”
“You can't be certain of that.”
“Nonsense,” Jarlaxle says, but he is holding the shard tightly. “It’s fully capable of controlling a few—”
“Is it?” Entreri gives him a significant look. “You know it would be too great a risk. And other options are available to us.”
Tension hovers around Jarlaxle’s mouth. “Kimmuriel, your thoughts?”
Curious, Kimmuriel reaches toward the shard, coiling strands of inquiry between Jarlaxle’s fingers. The shard has a dark, endothermic aura, queasy in the absence of sunlight. It hums like a mind—but distantly, as if through a wall. He begins to apply pressure to it, looking for a faultline or a weakness.
The shard repels him. An energetic push, like those his tutor would use in the early days of teaching him offensive telekinesis—but in the manner of a drow child flicking a beetle off a wall. It rattles him; he nearly stumbles.
“Kimmuriel?”
He collects himself. “I would advise against it,” he says.
Jarlaxle looks between them. “Of all things—of all things, you agree on this.”
“On this and nothing else,” Kimmuriel says. He is disquieted—by the shard, by Jarlaxle's behaviour, by the notion that Entreri knows more than he does. “As your human’s judgement is so poor in all other things. If only he had controlled himself, we would not be in such circumstances.”
Entreri’s mind goes dark and hot—ah, there. “I killed him out of necessity.”
“Do not insult our intelligence,” Kimmuriel retorts. “It was a personal vendetta, nothing more.”
“He would have sought to undermine us for the rest of his life.”
“He is doing so proficiently in death. You did not even consider—”
“Enough, enough!” Jarlaxle drowns them out. “Let us not retread this ground, it gains us nothing. The question before us is what to do.”
“I will find them,” Entreri says, “and deal with them. I was the target—it is my affair.”
Jarlaxle, however, is not looking at the human. His attention has again slipped away, to the crystal in his fist.
Kimmuriel hears the whine, moments before he feels it in his eyes, his sinuses, the roots of his teeth, like an electrical current. He is sensitive to telepathy—more sensitive than is practically useful, his tutor would say—but he cannot discern any form or language in this, any communication at all.
He walls himself off. He waits.
“Yes,” Jarlaxle murmurs. “Yes, I think so.” He looks up once more, his eye so clear it seems cutting. “You will root out the poisoner and any accomplices, and deal with them. Together.”
Outrage rises in Kimmuriel. He feels Entreri’s mind bristle—rough, red, animal hostility. Their voices clash.
“That is not necessary—”
“I work alone—”
Jarlaxle’s smile has soured. “I think it appropriate, in the spirit of allying our causes,” he says. “And combining your considerable talents should ensure all this is taken care of quickly, no?”
The insult is difficult to swallow. “There would be no benefit to—”
“We wish to determine the identity of the poisoner,” Jarlaxle says, “and if it was sponsored or contracted outside the guild.” Brisk and exacting, as if Kimmuriel is a stupid child. “You will find this out. Thereafter, you may deal with them by whatever means you choose. But if you’re unable to identify them quickly, I will use my own methods to conclude this business. Is that understood?”
He knows when Jarlaxle is immovable. "As you wish.”
Entreri, too, holds his tongue.
“Good!” Abruptly, Jarlaxle’s face resolves into easy humour. “Then make your investigations as you will—and come to me as soon as you have a name.”
Kimmuriel offers a shallow bow. He must go and think in solitude. “My quarters, human,” he says. He does not look at Entreri. “In one hour.”
The reply comes, bitingly: “If I must.”
“Very good.” Jarlaxle stands up from the divan. “In the meantime—Artemis, a moment?”
Entreri folds his arms, but his mind gives off a flint-spark of interest. He tracks Jarlaxle with his eyes.
After concluding a meeting in their Clawrift headquarters, Jarlaxle would often wait for the other lieutenants to file out before launching into a wild theory or elaborate plan. Sometimes for Kimmuriel’s counsel, sometimes to enjoy his disbelief. Beyond the elaborate piece of theatre, Kimmuriel could deduce that Jarlaxle found it useful to have a confidant who did not simper and scrape, but countered his worst excesses with reason.
That inciting grin. The sense of being found worthy above all others.
Artemis. Momentarily, he wants to break into Entreri by force and hear what Jarlaxle is about to tell him. He wants to smash Entreri’s mind and look in the smithereens for what has—inexplicably—caught Jarlaxle’s interest.
As he leaves, the image stays with him. Jarlaxle and the human side-by-side, and the crystal shard in Jarlaxle's hand.
Entreri was a child—small enough to crawl between the broken boards in the side of the house—when he saw magic for the first time.
The memory is brief. It was dark in the Akseray, shadows around the market stalls. A deal was being done; coins, voices. A man he didn’t know for a slaver made a gesture, and light appeared. A white, perfect sphere. It hung in the air.
For a while, he believed that was what magic was. Light, unexpectedly.
Then he saw it used on slaves.
When he was fifteen, the lieutenant he was fighting put him under a geas. The command was simple. It said, draw the blade across your throat.
He doesn’t remember Basadoni calling a stop to the bout, or bloodying his own neck trying to resist and obey at the same time, or being restrained by four soldiers while the charm was removed, struggling and snarling like a feral dog cornered in an alley. He remembers the warm, simple desire, the hook in his guts—blade across your throat—and that deep, bared-teeth instinct which said no i won’t no—
It became a lesson, as many things did. They repeated it until he could throw the magical compulsion off entirely, which he did by imagining he was a pit, fathoms deep and empty. The spell's hook fell through him, skipping off stone, and caught on nothing.
“Magic is a tool,” Basadoni said to him, when he came around in bed after that first encounter. “But only if it does not use you.”
Jarlaxle is still holding the shard.
“No love lost between you,” he says, when Kimmuriel’s footsteps on the stair have died away.
Entreri places a hand flat on the pillar. He wants to lean his head and close his eyes; but even as the urge comes he makes himself straighten and focus on Jarlaxle.
It's a hot night, usual for Flamerule, but Jarlaxle seems comfortable: silk shirt tucked into dark breeches, jewels in his ears and around his throat and wrists, hat angled to show his dark red eyepatch. Sharp, glittering.
He's never seen someone wear their own face like Jarlaxle does—like a parody, a lure, and a performance. But Jarlaxle isn’t hiding: in that single red eye is a personality so undiluted it draws others in with no effort. A tidal pull, deep and difficult to resist. It inculcates an easy, unthinking wish to look—and to keep looking, and listen, even when he hates what Jarlaxle is saying. He doesn’t know if it's magic or not; but it seems indistinguishable from it. It's certainly dangerous.
“Are you surprised?” he says.
“No, no.” Jarlaxle tosses the poison vial back to him. “I expected the objections.”
He tucks the vial into a pocket. “I can work with him if I must.”
He has no choice. There's been no blade to his back, no outright threat; instead, a slower accumulation of signs which indicate that Jarlaxle is protecting him, not strictly out of need—they have other humans—but for more complex reasons. It's a game where the rules change from round to round, while the stake on the table remains the same—his life. This much he knows: he must be cooperative; he must facilitate. Above all, he must be interesting.
Jarlaxle smiles, showing white teeth. “Well, that’s why I proposed it.”
He watches Jarlaxle turn the shard over, and draw the edge of a polished facet. Then Jarlaxle slides it away.
“They’re growing bolder, you know. Despite Sharlotta’s claims they’d be taken aback by any upheaval.” Jarlaxle walks toward him and stops, too close. A frisson of sharpness passes over his scalp as they read each other.
“The Rakers, you mean,” he says. “If it is the Rakers.”
“You believe it is.”
“I suspect it is. But I know it would be foolish to act without more information.”
“We have the advantage. Now is the time to remove them entirely, and—”
In Menzoberranzan, he watched his captor steer Bregan D’aerthe’s affairs with a genius which seemed improvised even when it was meticulously planned, remarkable luck, and a certain viciousness. Jarlaxle has an unswerving instinct for people and what they want; and the stratagems always looked riskier than they were. Jarlaxle liked to unravel his opponents slowly and completely, as if unwrapping a worthy gift bundled in silks.
Since the drow came to the surface, the stratagems have changed. Perhaps Jarlaxle has information, or leverage. Perhaps he has peerless insight into Calimport’s criminal underground. Perhaps he has, as he claims, entered into some remarkable alliance which will change the nature of the game entirely. It doesn’t matter. Destroying the most deeply entrenched guild in the city can only end in disaster.
Jarlaxle sounds less and less like the brilliant mercenary Entreri met in the Underdark. He sounds greedy, and impulsive, and wrathful. He sounds like a fanatic.
Entreri says, “You told me they were beneath your notice.”
“Oh, they are.”
“Not if you fixate on them. Did you come to the surface to wage turf wars with humans?”
Expressions go darkly through Jarlaxle’s visible eye. After a moment, he snorts softly. “No.”
“Then concern yourself with other things,” Entreri says. “We'll make our investigations.”
“See that you do,” Jarlaxle says, lightly, with the barest edge of threat.
Entreri watches him sidle around the divan and trail his fingers along the upholstery. Then Jarlaxle leans against the back of the seat, crossing his ankles, and looks out over the city.
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“What.”
“None of them know I’m here. You, and Sharlotta, yes. But all those thousands of humans living down there,” he waves his hand toward the lights, “have no notion that their coin goes into my pockets, that I control everything that happens in this quarter—the rhythms of their very lives.”
“I assure you, that’s preferable.”
“Hm.” Jarlaxle smiles—an odd, private smile. “Perhaps.”
As they stand there, a distant bell begins to toll. It's midnight. Entreri looks toward the sound, but in the periphery of his vision he watches Jarlaxle.
Jarlaxle says, “I’ve decided we’ll use the pasha’s training hall tomorrow morning.”
Sparring with Jarlaxle in Basadoni’s hall. He deflects: “That room faces east.”
“What of it?”
“The sunlight, obviously.”
“Oh, that's no matter,” Jarlaxle says, but only days ago he was as chary of the sun as the rest of his men.
Entreri shrugs, feigning nonchalance. “On your head be it.”
“If it’s a true hindrance, perhaps it’ll make it a fairer fight.”
“That depends. Are you bringing real weapons, or just the arsenal of petty tricks?”
Jarlaxle laughs from his belly. A bright sound, and a surprise. “All of them.”
“And the shard?”
“As I said before—I’ve no need of it for this.”
“Good.” He doesn’t believe it.
“Seventh bell, then.”
For many reasons, he shouldn’t accept. But Jarlaxle looks at him with expectation, with challenge, with the full and brilliant force of that personality—and he says, “Very well.”
Before he can raise his hand, the door swings open.
Entreri presses his lips together. He lets out a short, savage sigh through his nose.
Kimmuriel is sitting at the table in the middle of the room, a thick volume propped before him. A rough-cut crystal casts him in a thin yellow glow. The effect is like the luminescence in the Underdark, which Entreri remembers: the walls covered in bloom, the light watery, prismatic.
“Enter,” Kimmuriel says, without looking up.
These underground quarters belonged to Yeri Naiid, one of the wizards killed when Bregan D’aerthe took control of the guild. They were gaudy; Kimmuriel has stripped them plain.
It's disconcerting, this image of Kimmuriel is his own habitat. To Entreri's mind, Kimmuriel might as well cease to exist when he's out of sight: too strange and cold and remote to have any kind of inner life. But here is the evidence of just that, a life lived out of view. Books pack the shelves wall to wall, devices of glass and adamantine whir and tick on the workbench, a robe with silver brocade hangs from a hook. On the table, between charring and pits left by spell damage, there's a black quill standing in an ink bottle, an earthenware cup on a saucer, and a stack of volumes with the spines aligned.
The door closes itself. The book turns a page.
Kimmuriel lifts his head. Against his shoulder his hair sways in its loose, thick braid. He has the kind of pretty, delicate, symmetrical face Menzoberranyr noblewomen like, except that it gives the illusion of being sharper than it is and doesn't move as it should, and alarms some hindbrain instinct by its unnatural stillness. His eyes are a dark gold red. They make Entreri think of coins; he wonders if that drew Jarlaxle's attention first, before anything else.
“As a rule,” Kimmuriel says, in Drow, “I do not work with humans. Your stupidity makes you more unreliable than cave lizards.”
“As a rule,” Entreri replies, in Common, “I don’t work with drow, who overestimate their own capabilities and invariably suffer for it.”
“If you persist in speaking that barbaric tongue, I will end this meeting.”
“Some find it difficult to learn,” Entreri says. “I understand.” Kimmuriel’s eyes thin, which is worth a momentary fumble with word order as he tries the drow tongue. “Jarlaxle… must be disappointed.”
“I have learned as much as necessary, and no more. We will not remain here long.”
“Does Jarlaxle know that? You seem not to have informed him—or he has very different ideas.”
“He will be persuaded,” Kimmuriel says. His voice verges on the hypnotic, lilting from beat to beat, never touching any word too heavily. The book slides away from him and thumps shut. He lays his hands flat on the table. “Therefore we will conclude this quickly, so that I can return to matters which truly require my attention.”
This is the first time they've spoken alone. Kimmuriel is often in Rai’gy’s company, and seems content to let Rai’gy's swagger and bigotry take up most of the air, while mirroring him with a mien of detachment. He's visibly the younger of the two, but his lack of deference toward Rai’gy seems more neutral than arrogant: evidently he's also more powerful, by such a degree that there's little tension between them, because there's nothing to negotiate.
“You recognise, at the very least, that his use of the crystal shard is becoming a concern.”
“It’s a sentient artefact.” He’ll give Kimmuriel nothing, but privately he agrees. Watching Jarlaxle commune with the shard was unsettling.
“What has he told you of it?”
“No more than he has you, I assume.”
Kimmuriel rises from his seat. He's slighter than Jarlaxle; he looks almost fragile. His robes are matte black silk, offering no bulk. When he moves it's smooth and economical, like a snake.
“I would advise you to tell me what you know. These are complex matters, not for creatures of meagre intelligence—”
Entreri steps forward, a sullen churning in his gut. He knows Kimmuriel can see the drow sword on his belt, one of Jarlaxle’s many gifts to him. He rests his hand beside it, running his thumb across the wrapped hilt. “Keep going.”
Kimmuriel’s face doesn’t change, but on the table his fingers bend and unbend. “Threats do not concern me. I could turn your mind inside out before you had gone three paces.”
Entreri takes another step forward, not blinking. “I’m sure you find some comfort in that. A thought is quicker than a blade, it’s true.”
“Indeed.”
“As long as you always see it coming, that is.”
On the workbench, something rattles.
The air starts to tremble: a low but rising vibration. This is what Entreri felt inside the crystal tower before Do’Urden was killed, and on the staircase the night the Basadoni Guild fell to them. Latent, violent. Kimmuriel’s power is many things, it seems—but this he understands in some intuitive way, as if Kimmuriel had pulled a knife.
“It is obvious,” Kimmuriel says, quietly, “that despite Jarlaxle’s... enthusiasm, our capabilities and methods are not remotely complementary.”
“Astute of you,” Entreri replies.
“Thus, we will go about our investigations separately. I will sift the guild’s members for information. You… may proceed by whatever dismal methods you can manage.”
“Are you capable of examining them discreetly?”
“I am not a fumbling amateur. And humans are no more perceptive than cattle.”
Entreri lets the insult slide off him, because he must. “Very well.”
“I will require a few days. We will reconvene at the appropriate time.”
“You know where to find me.”
“Always,” Kimmuriel says, and Entreri's skin constricts.
They stare at each other.
Behind Entreri the door unlatches and creaks open. “That is all,” Kimmuriel says. “You may leave.”
All this is familiar, and violently horrible. In Menzoberranzan they pretended at giving him freedom: leave whenever you wish, Jarlaxle told him. None will stop you. Why, I'll even give you a map. This, after Jarlaxle had troubled to describe the horrible ends that met even seasoned drow patrols in the wilderness beyond the city limits—how much venom is in a ghostyk, what a hook horror does to flesh. Are you much of a gambler? I shouldn't like your chances. Then Jarlaxle and his people watched him roam every inch of his confinement as it became more hostile and impossible, entertained by his desperation.
The drow have made Calimport no less a cage. Helplessness is like a hand trying to close around his throat. The thought bubbles up in him, sick, unbidden: I can’t leave.
He knows by the curl of Kimmuriel’s mouth that it was overheard.
Kimmuriel steps around the table, and closer, out of the light. Entreri watches his barren eyes flicker into darkvision and begin to glow.
“It amuses Jarlaxle to use you in our work here.” Kimmuriel is speaking Common now—quietly, with a heavy accent. “To use you to play in human affairs. But your uses are limited, you will not amuse him forever. And when he is tired of you, you—will not go from this place alive, iblith.”
The threat hangs between them.
Entreri feels a surge of something—exhaustion, fury, hatred. Again, he's struck by the madness of his situation. The scale of the danger, the capabilities of his enemies both alone and together, and the contortions into which he's being forced. Following Jarlaxle, preoccupied with power he knows nothing about. Tolerating an unending stream of bile and insults, with no latitude to refute or silence them. Cooperating with Kimmuriel, because if he isn't useful he is dead. And perhaps he'll be dead regardless.
“No doubt you’ll try,” he says, turning away. “I look forward to it.”
Chapter Text
His sleep is restless. Entreri wakes with the impression of a face on his eyelids. Myopic, but too dark to be anything but drow.
The hour before dawn is coolest. A breeze rocks the drapes; the hair rises on his arms. The stone is cold under his bare feet.
He didn’t take up the pasha’s rooms—too visible, too obvious. These quarters on the second floor are smaller and not overlooked, a better choice for a newly-minted guildmaster with many enemies. For six bicentas a week, one of the servants, Siyen, makes the pasha’s rooms appear inhabited, and brings his meals here.
Coffee is left in the room just beyond where he sleeps. He drinks it on the balcony as the sun comes up, watching doves strut through the blue shadow under the orange trees.
The fight with Drizzt comes back to him, sometimes. Their feud—their rivalry—was a splinter which worked itself under many layers of flesh; and now it’s out, and what remains is old pain and scarring. It wasn’t the answer he hoped for. It wasn’t an answer at all. There are no satisfying answers to be had; nothing to do but go on.
Everything seems pervaded by a strange lassitude, as if he’s been running for years and only now realised that he has no destination in mind. A line has been drawn through the middle of his life, severing him from years of tireless, uncompromising purpose. There's something ridiculous about it now—all that striving, at such cost. It’s like contemplating the actions of another man. The sense of purpose is gone; the need to excel. Replaced, perhaps, by the simple determination that he won’t give the drow the pleasure of murdering him. He can almost hear them, three floors below. The guildhouse seems pervaded by them, as if the walls might whisper in their tongue.
What have you brought into my house? Basadoni’s last words to him.
Allies, Entreri would have told him. Enemies.
Having dressed, he reads through the stack of correspondence on the table outside his room. Siyen brings him a small meal, setting the tray down beside him. Bread, cured meat, figs.
“Here, pasha.” The title is still like being slapped.
“Don’t call me that.”
Grovellingly, “Apologies, master.” Most of these servants waited on Basadoni for years; they know only the frailties and ire of an old man.
“That’s all,” he says. Siyen lingers at his shoulder. He feels a pulse of annoyance. “Go.”
A hasty bow, a hastier exit. “Master.”
Master of what, he wonders.
Basadoni was a private man: he didn’t receive visitors in his own quarters, and few were allowed to enter.
Three months after being made a lieutenant, Entreri broke in. Curiosity, maybe, or the need for a challenge. When he came into the cool sitting room where Basadoni read his papers over breakfast, he found a note pinned under an opal paperweight. It congratulated him for cunning and initiative, and threatened him with severe punishment should he trespass again. He never did: it was enough to show Basadoni that he could, and he was chagrined at being anticipated.
That was long ago, and the old man is dead; but Entreri still feels a weight of caution as he passes the guards, takes the ring of keys from his belt and unlocks the vast green doors. He hadn’t set foot in these rooms since becoming guildmaster, until last night.
He has an impression of height, and air. Pale blue walls soar up to a canopy resting on pillars. The ceiling is a mosaic of blue, green, and gold strapwork, a dizzying span of shapes and stars. The arched windows have glass panes, framed by translucent drapes.
Many rooms lead off from this one. The bedchamber, unlocked with another key, is modest. White stone, and a ceiling of tiles glazed cobalt blue. The bed is built from dark wood, dressed with clean linen, and glaringly empty.
Basadoni was eighty-seven, and dying slowly of a wasting disease. Even at the end he kept a certain dignity, as much as his puppeteers allowed him. On the night Entreri killed him, he was lying in bed, propped against the pillows: calm but frail, with thin silver hair and dark liver spots on the backs of his hands. He’d lost none of his faculties, only all of his power.
Standing over him, Entreri thought of him in his heyday. Fifteen years ago he had as much sway in Calimport as the syl-pasha himself; and Entreri was his instrument, the knife he used to excise what couldn’t be bought or quelled by other means.
In those days, Basadoni loomed giant in the landscape of his mind. The man who pulled him off the streets, trained him, educated him, shaped him. The man who put him through test after punishing test and demanded that he succeed. The only person he ever cared to impress.
And have I passed, pasha?
The old man laughed, that heaving worn gasp. Always, always—ah, until now. I did caution you against pride, Artemis.
No, Entreri said. You underestimated me, for twenty years.
Kimmuriel was correct in one respect. He didn’t know he was going to kill Basadoni until it was already done. He considers it fair repayment—for the favour Basadoni did him long ago, by giving him his life; and for the life Basadoni gave him.
See what you’ve started, Basadoni said. You’ve brought ruin down on us.
Have I? You don’t know, and nor do your lieutenants.
I know you’ve no allegiances, none that will help you. You’re beaten, even if you haven’t realised it yet.
And that’s what you wanted?
Another laugh.
You mean to ask—if I still care for you, Basadoni’s voice was waning, and of course I do. I don’t wish you ill. But you understand, don’t you, that you’ve begun a war you can’t win.
Suddenly, the room feels airless. Entreri opens a window, the latch hot from the sun. The breeze smells warm and salted. Swallows dart past like loosed arrows. He has a brief vision of them veering straight for his chest.
What have you brought into my house?
He searched the chamber last night, after the servant’s body was removed. There was no evidence of an intruder. The enchantments on the windows were in tact; nothing was disturbed. The guards claimed to have seen no one, and it would have been difficult for anyone to enter Basadoni’s rooms without notice—unless they were meant to be there.
He leaves the bedchamber, and opens the grand doors again. The two guards outside the pasha’s rooms glance back at him. They discovered the poisoned servant during a cursory sweep of the bedchamber; he’s kept them posted at the doors since. Only they know what happened here, and he hasn’t quite ruled out their involvement.
“Pasha?”
“Come in.”
They hasten to obey. He points into the dressing room. Fine robes and shirts in many colours and fabrics hang from brass hooks. A syl-pasha’s fortune in jewellery is arrayed on a table. “Wait in there.”
He sees the look between them, but they do as he bids. He shuts the doors, and locks them in. He wants them out of sight.
Servants aren’t allowed into the pasha’s quarters at night; but they clean and air the rooms each morning. Siyen is the first to arrive. When he lets himself into the pasha’s rooms, Entreri is waiting for him.
“Oh, master. Should I come back when—”
“No, come in.”
Siyen enters, and stands attentively before him, near to where the corpse lay hours ago but with no notion of it. Evidently he didn't betray where Entreri actually resides.
On the table near the bed, the small decanter is still half-full of wine. A note in a looping hand beside it reads: Ophelli 1297. Entreri lifts out the stopper. “This wine—”
“Oh,” Siyen says, “it’s special, I was told. The finest, rarest wine in the pasha’s collection.”
“I know,” Entreri says. “The syl-pasha gave it to him fourteen years ago, for work that I performed.”
And it was chosen by someone who knew that, who hoped his pride would get the better of him. It would smell like fine wine, and taste like fine wine, and a tablespoon of it would kill him.
“How often is the wine in this decanter refreshed.”
“Every day, master.” Siyen corrects himself, “Every other day, at the most.”
This is an old practice. Basadoni stopped drinking late in life, for his health; but when he was younger he had a taste for very fine vintages. The servants, knowing nothing of Entreri, assumed he would also.
“Where’s the rest of the bottle?”
“In here.” Bending, Siyen opens the cabinet to reveal a wine bottle with the cork pushed back into the neck. The Ophelli. Immediately, Entreri realises that the bottle itself is poisoned. An enchantment keeps the cabinet cool; the wine would last several days. Several chances to kill him, if only he could be tempted.
He says, “You were on duty yesterday.”
“I was.”
“Was the wine changed.”
Siyen frowns. “Yes—before that it was a Venna Erade estate red, something from the twenties. Actually, when I saw this label yesterday, I thought it was strange the pasha’s best wine had been put out for, well, no reason at all.”
“Who was responsible for changing it.”
“I don’t know, master. I didn’t see.”
“Then who else was working at that time.”
“There were four of us. It was—”
Entreri is about to answer; then he holds up his hand for silence. The other servants are entering the pasha’s quarters, speaking quietly:
“—going on, but Nejdet knew nothing of it.”
“—allowed to leave, I heard the guards near the eastern wall. Did you ask—”
After a minute, he hears a quiet, perfunctory knock at the bedchamber door. The servants—except Siyen—believe that he sleeps in this room and rises before dawn. They won’t expect to find him here.
A key clicks in the lock from the other side. As the doors swing apart, he positions himself so that he’s barely in view.
The woman’s dark eyes widen at the sight of him.
“Don’t react,” he says, quietly. “Don’t say anything.”
He stands back, indicating that she should enter. She obeys, snagging her sleeve on the doorknob in her haste, and he walks past her, into the dining room. The two other servants are dusting and polishing the dining table. They don’t notice his progress.
He shuts the grand doors to Basadoni’s quarters and locks them. The servants look up, startled, and almost shrink from him. Then he unlocks the door to the dressing room, where the guards are waiting.
“You as well,” he says, gesturing to the bedchamber. “In there, all of you.”
They walk ahead of him into the bedchamber, struck silent. Their fear of him is palpable. He locks the bedchamber doors behind him.
“Sit or stand,” he tells them, “I don’t care.”
He looks at them, all five, in the guild's white and red. Loyal servants to Basadoni; to him, a basket of snakes.
He turns to Siyen. “Continue. Who was working at the time.”
“Aja,” Siyen points to the woman on the right, “and Calant,” the woman in the centre. “And Niketas, but he isn’t here. I’m not sure—”
“Niketas is dead. He drank the poisoned wine intended for me.”
A shock goes through the room.
“I told him about the wine,” Siyen says, softly. “He’s from the Tashalar, wine country. He talks about how he misses the vineyards, and I knew you wouldn’t—”
“You knew I wouldn’t drink it.”
Siyen presses his teeth into his lower lip. “I’m sorry, master, I, I didn’t—I thought it would be a waste, not…” His throat clutches. “He’s dead, he’s really—”
“Yes. And one of you put the arsenic there.”
He walks toward them, looking at each face in turn. They’re afraid of him, but guilt has a different look to fear.
The woman in the middle—Calant—keeps her dark head down. He stops in front of her. “Look at me.”
Her eyes are bright and wet. She’s Calishite, young, kempt, with rounded cheeks and an unsettled mouth. As she stares at him, she seems no longer able to hold her face still—it comes spilling out. “Pasha, I didn’t want to—I didn’t—”
She covers her face with her hands. He feels a distaste like swallowing bitter citrus. She might hate him and fear him; but she’s only the instrument. No servant would try to kill him with such a rare, expensive, and particular poison, or stay inside the guildhouse after the attempt.
He pins her with his gaze. “I know the order to kill me came from someone else. I want to know who it was.”
She points to the others. “They’re—not involved,” she says, slowly, as if each word is a footing she must test before placing weight on it. “None of them knew.”
“Is that true.”
He looks at the rest. He’s seen no flinches or tells from them; and, strangely, he believes her. And yet—all of this is too easy, too obvious.
He tells the servants, “You may leave. If you speak of this to anyone—”
They hurry out. Siyen remains, with the two guards Entreri didn’t dismiss.
“Who gave you the arsenic.”
“It was—”
She gasps. Then she brings her hands up, scrabbling at her neck, as she continues to gasp but take in no air.
“Stop panicking.”
“I—can’t—I can’t—” Her throat is closing; she’s suffocating.
“Tell me.”
“I can’t, if I try to—” Her lips go on moving, but the only sound that comes out is thin and strangled. “Please—”
This isn’t panic. He puts it together, and steps back from her.
Slowly, her breathing sags into a rhythm.
“It’s like a, like a hand,“ she pants, feigning with her own hand. “Around my neck. Please, I—”
“A curse,” he says, and her eyes confirm it. “They’ve cursed you so that you can’t reveal them.”
He’s versed in curses, somewhat. He’s been the target of more than a few. To bind her like this would require a lot of power, or a lot of coin.
“If I—it will—I think it will kill me.”
“Can you put it in writing.”
She shakes her head, barely. Even compelling her to speak of it is a risk.
“You can’t speak of it, and you can’t write it down. Can you show me something that might be of use.”
“I—don’t know. In my room—”
“Very well.” He’s cautious of the curse’s limits. To the guards, he says, “Escort her. Make sure she doesn’t do anything foolish.”
They bow, and follow her out.
When they’re alone, Siyen says, “May I—sit down, master?”
“If you wish.”
With that, Siyen staggers onto a chair.
Entreri finds himself staring at the bed. Unaccountably, he sees the bloodstain, the body. Basadoni's face.
From behind him, Siyen says, “Is it true, did you—”
He’s revealing too much. “Yes.”
“I thought you—”
Entreri turns, and Siyen is silenced by his look.
Many people know Basadoni was his mentor. Few know what that means.
Minutes later, Calant returns with a handful of parchment fragments, crinkled and soft from folding. Messages—very short, most no more than a line or two. At first the script appears to be nonsense; a code of some kind.
The other object is a book, a volume of Calimshan folk tales, which she lays on the table. Her hand trembles as she lifts the cover and turns the pages. She stops at the title verso of a tale with elaborate lettering: The Camel Driver and the Adder.
His mother told him the story once; he recalls it as he glances over the text. He can see faint jotted marks on the parchment, above and between the letters. Nothing useful.
Calant is watching him. “You know how to decipher these,” he holds up the messages, “using this,” he taps the book.
She nods.
“But you can’t show me, or describe it, and you can’t provide me with anything else.”
“No,” she says, hoarsely.
Entreri wonders if it was a serious attempt to poison him at all, or if he's simply being taunted.
Calant says, tremulously, “I’ll leave, pasha, I’ll leave, and not say anything—”
Basadoni would have killed her for this—or had her killed, his own hands kept bloodless. She knows too much; and she went through with the poisoning itself. But Entreri finds has no appetite for it. He wants the person behind her, the one pulling strings.
“No,” he says. “You’ll go on with your duties, as if nothing happened.”
“Pasha?” She lets out her breath in a shudder. “Thank you, pasha—I’m—”
“Get out.”
She leaves at almost a run, fumbling with the grand doors. Entreri dismisses the guards as well.
Quietly, Siyen clears his throat. He is on his feet. “Will there be anything else, master?”
Entreri looks toward the window. “Tell the spymaster I want to see him, in my office.”
“He’s away at present, master.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Yes, master.”
Then he's alone. The sky beyond the window is a scalding, brittle blue. Ragged shapes wheel between the towers of Calimport. He thinks of vultures circling.
He goes to find Jarlaxle.
Four days after the coup, Jarlaxle invited him to spar.
Entreri knew this was unusual. When Jarlaxle’s men learned what their leader was doing, the mutterings were rife. Jarlaxle didn’t spar with anyone, let alone a human.
Jarlaxle chose a room in the sub-basement, and had Rai’gy cast a stoneskin on both of them. Then he sent his lieutenant away and locked the doors.
They fought each other for two hours. Jarlaxle’s fighting style with a rapier reminded him of the Marozzo fencing taught in Amn—or its bastardised form favoured by Nelanther pirates. Showy, wasteful; a defence full of holes. He scorned it until the wild feints and quickstepping—sometimes with a dagger, sometimes not—allowed Jarlaxle to disarm him and mime cutting his throat. By the end, he’d managed to wear out Jarlaxle’s stoneskin and score a grazing slice to Jarlaxle’s wrist.
“Oh, very good,” Jarlaxle breathed. They were close together, and his eye was bright and direct. “Very good. Tomorrow?”
Out of sheer exhilaration, Entreri almost grinned. “Very well.”
Another invitation came three nights later; and then again, four days after that.
The last time they fought, he knocked Jarlaxle to the floor.
His dagger was about to punch through the crumbling stoneskin that remained—a straight stab to the chest, the same way Do’Urden died. A froth of blood like sea foam.
But he hesitated. Jarlaxle was staring up at him, like Drizzt had. Unlike Drizzt, the look was utterly pitiless.
When he came round, he was leaned like a sack against the wall. A length of time was missing. His mind felt bruised and manhandled, cold with despair. Moving his head made the nausea kick up into his throat. At first he believed Kimmuriel had attacked him, but Kimmuriel was nowhere in sight—only Jarlaxle, holding the shard.
“You’re getting slow,” Jarlaxle said.
It tore a sharp bubble of laughter from him. “You didn’t outmatch me.”
With that, Jarlaxle changed, like a coin flipped.
“I can destroy you.” The opposing face to all that charisma was—it seemed—a twitchy, too-bright anger. “I can destroy you, with only a thought.” He's holding the shard so tightly his knuckles stand out. “That’s all it would take. Never forget that.”
Entreri, discomfited, didn’t reply. Then the grin returned, like the hard glint on a gold ingot, and Jarlaxle sent him away.
The next evening, Jarlaxle asked him again.
“No.”
“No?” Jarlaxle seemed puzzled.
Laughable, the idea of any etiquette between them, any decency or restraint between an assassin and a mercenary, a human and a drow. Jarlaxle considered him a pawn—some lesser creature able to tolerate any horror or humiliation. He bore it in Menzoberranzan; and yet, in this place, something in him chafed at it.
“I don’t feel inclined to have my mind attacked again.”
Jarlaxle spread his hands, shrugged. “I use the weapons at my disposal.”
“You have plenty of soldiers. Spar with them. Or Berg’inyon—he seems at least moderately skilled.”
As he turned to leave, Jarlaxle called sharply, “I can defeat you without it.”
“Can you.”
“Of course.”
“Then put it aside,” Entreri said. “Can you do that?”
Basadoni’s training hall is unchanged since Entreri last saw it, years ago.
He was brought here for the first time when he was fourteen. His first mentor, Theebles Royuset, was a sadist he took pleasure in killing. His second mentor, unexpectedly, was Basadoni himself.
By then the pasha was in his sixties, no longer as quick and able as he once was. He didn’t fight Entreri. Instead, he brought opponent after opponent to this hall and ordered Entreri to defend himself.
Again, Basadoni would say, after watching him beaten down a dozen times by a man twice his size. Entreri can hear the exact pitch and cadence. Again. It went on for hour after hour, until he could fight his opponent to a standstill, and then disarm him.
Exhaustion melded one day into another. Conditioning, drills, fights—sweat, bruises, blisters, his muscles screaming sore. The litany of injuries: a broken collarbone, six cracked ribs, a shattered arm, a gut wound that almost disembowelled him, a concussion that laid him out for a tenday. The numbness of being so tired he couldn’t be certain if he was awake.
By the time he was sixteen, the assignment had become notorious within the guild. An opportunity to be humiliated by a child while the guildmaster looked on.
He was exceptional, and half the guild wished him dead. He became a target for all the arrows of their resentment, jealousy, and thwarted ambition. Thieves cornered him behind the guildhouse. A soldier tried to smother him while he slept. The lieutenant nearly garrotted him in the baths. He killed them, and endured the punishments. He learned to defeat everyone Basadoni put in front of him. He surpassed them all—every challenge, every test.
Again.
Early sunlight cascades in through the small eastern window of the hall. Jarlaxle casts a long thin shadow across the floor.
“Good morning! Shall we?”
The new memories sit strangely beside the old. Flashes of conjured daggers, the gritty chime of a rapier against his sword, how that ridiculous feather bobs and sways when Jarlaxle tips up his hat brim.
Their last bout ends in stalemate. Jarlaxle is beaming, laughing. It’s a different kind of laughter to any Entreri remembers in this place.
“Let’s meet again tomorrow, yes?”
Again.
The code eludes him.
He sits in Basadoni’s office, burning the oil lamp low, until the letters on the parchment begin to swim, and the feeble curl of light against the gloom reminds him too much of Menzoberranzan.
He retires, and dreams of sand running between his fingers.
The next morning, when he enters the hall, Jarlaxle doesn’t offer a greeting in the usual ironic fashion. He doesn’t seem to notice Entreri is there.
Jarlaxle is standing by the window, wincing at the sunlight. He has some magic that protects him from it, but the drow sensitivity is very acute. Entreri has seen Rai’gy treating soldiers for migraines, exhaustion, eye damage, and even blisters, from the exposure. Jarlaxle’s brow is tense with pain, but his gaze is determined, as if he might defeat his own physiology by will alone.
Green light is refracted on Jarlaxle’s face, like a watercolour daub. Entreri doesn’t need to see the shard; he knows Jarlaxle is holding it.
“Jarlaxle.”
Jarlaxle blinks, and puts up a hand to shade his eyes. “Ah, good,” he says.
“Are you trying to burn your eyes out.”
Jarlaxle smiles, that smile with thorns when Entreri lands a hit, or near enough. “An experiment.” His other hand moves, a sleight that would be easy to miss except that Entreri is watching for it. The shard tucked away, unseen.
Entreri draws his weapons and they square up to each other. No stoneskin today, it seems.
Jarlaxle leads with a pair of thrown daggers, then three in rapid order—shot high, low, high. Entreri sidesteps and ducks, and closes the rest of the distance. Jarlaxle meets him with the rapier, but not aggressively, giving ground.
His sword scythes in toward Jarlaxle’s neck. He’s surprised to have the advantage so quickly; he’s being lured. At the last moment he turns the blade so that the flat of it screeches off Jarlaxle’s dagger, giving Jarlaxle time to turn that aside and slip out of danger, distancing himself.
“Pulling your strikes?” Jarlaxle says. “How unsporting.”
“I thought the point was not to kill each other.”
“Not kill,” Jarlaxle says. “But the possibility of drawing blood makes it more interesting, no? Besides, you need to be prepared, my friend. If someone means to do away with you—”
“I’ll kill them,” Entreri says. “As I killed all the others.”
Another dagger arrows in without warning—and another, and another. Entreri dodges left, but the last slits his sleeve.
“Too slow, perhaps?”
“No,” Entreri says.
His view condenses to the blades trying to pick apart his defence, Jarlaxle's energy and momentum and layered misdirection, the brief and unreliable tells in Jarlaxle’s posture which might suggest an opening. Jarlaxle is quick, very quick, and so fluent in motion that it’s like watching a drill or choreographed steps, motion done a hundred times. The clang and scrape of their blades is a continuous sound.
“I was concerned,” Jarlaxle’s breathing has become choppy, his voice taut across the vowels, “that I wouldn’t get such a good show out of you.”
“As good as what.”
“Why, with Drizzt, in the tower. You were magnificent then. Perhaps you’ll never be so magnificent again. Humans are nearly useless after the age of forty—do I have that right?”
“You don’t believe that,” Entreri says, “or you’d be sparring with Berg’inyon. Almost Do’Urden’s equal, I’ve heard.”
“Almost. He’s quite a prize in his own right, you know—one of Baenre’s noble sons. Unlike a human, he’ll only improve with age.”
“Drow don’t improve with age—they only become more arrogant. Do you ever tire of parroting the same dull sayings about the superiority of your kind?”
“And what if they’re true?”
Perhaps Jarlaxle will never see him as more than a lowly thing, albeit one with uncommon skill and a modicum of intelligence. Like Basadoni—test after test, and to succeed is somehow to fail.
“They’re not,” he says.
“Oh?”
“You tested me against Drizzt because you wanted to be certain of what you were getting. Are you satisfied yet?”
“You asked for that fight.”
“No, I agreed to it. You proposed it, even when I told you I had no interest in fighting him again.”
Jarlaxle's cuts and thrusts get faster, and faster. “Because that was untrue.”
“It was a test.”
“If so, don’t you think you failed it?”
“I could have killed him fairly.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Then I would have killed him the next time,” Entreri says, trapping the rapier point with his dagger and pushing it aside, “had you not intervened. Every fight between us turned on luck and happenstance. The difference between us was negligible.”
“Was it, indeed.”
“He was the best of you, and I could have beaten him.”
“Be careful, my friend. Is this human arrogance?”
“It’s a fact—which you knew, or you’d have withheld that fight from me until I secured your front guild and your trade routes.”
“That seems—ha!—quite a gamble.” Jarlaxle’s rapier scrapes the length of his blade, over the tip, and slices the side of his neck. No pain, but his pulse thickens around the wound.
“It was. You need me.”
“Perhaps.”
“I know what I’m worth.” He looks Jarlaxle directly in the eyes. “Do you?”
And have I passed, pasha?
Jarlaxle sees off the next right-left sweep toward his head with a flick of his blade. He looks thoughtful, which is itself threatening.
“You’ve lost nothing,” he says. “Except some of that passion, I think.”
“I was trying to kill him.”
“And you’ve no such intentions toward me?”
Entreri’s answer is an outward punch of a parry, using brute force to break Jarlaxle’s momentum and rock his footing. Jarlaxle, nimble, lets himself be pushed backward, dodges the following sword thrust, and now begins to circle Entreri.
“Lost your teeth, have you? Perhaps Drizzt won in the end, if you’ve no real fight left in you after all that—”
Entreri knows Jarlaxle is trying to rile him, but not why. “I’m not one of your lieutenants,” he says. “I’m not caught up in my own pride and small grievances.”
“Pride—isn’t that why you killed Drizzt? And Basadoni?”
“No.”
Jarlaxle dances backward and lets fly another dagger, a second, a third. Entreri knocks one aside, ducks the next. As the last flies at him, he sheathes his sword and snatches it from the air. The leather of his glove tears across the palm; he’ll know soon if the blade’s poisoned. There’s barely a thought behind it: he hurls it back—and the rapier comes up an instant too late. It slices Jarlaxle’s cheek.
Jarlaxle grunts, staggers back. He’s only a foot from the wall. Advancing, Entreri picks off the rapier—it goes flying—then twists the dagger over hard, yanking Jarlaxle’s wrist back until he breaks the grip. It clangs onto the ground. He uses that arm to slam Jarlaxle against the stone, crushes him to it, and rests his dagger at Jarlaxle’s throat.
He feels Jarlaxle’s other arm tense, bent awkwardly between their bodies. Jarlaxle’s hand makes a fist—he’s summoned another blade from his bracer. Entreri wonders if he'll ever run out of tricks.
They stare at each other. Jarlaxle wets his lips.
“Drop it,” Entreri says.
The cut on Jarlaxle’s face has bled at a lateral angle, and he is smiling, strangely. Too late, Entreri recognises the expression. It isn't a blade in Jarlaxle's hand.
“Don’t—”
It breaks over him like a wave. There’s no way to resist, no defence against such thunderous force. He breaks apart, scattered, just so much churning and darkness and foam.
He’s lying on the stone. Hot, in the light. His first urge is to tip over and vomit; he tries to master it, breathing through his mouth. There’s a high whining in his ears, and his head throbs—he might be concussed—but worst is the despair squeezing his throat.
A shadow is approaching him. Jarlaxle. He can’t see a weapon; worse, he can see the shard. “Stop it,” he says—stupid, futile—and his fingers close around the hilt of his dagger, which has fallen beside him. He rolls over and tucks his feet under him, rising fast.
“Artemis—” Tension in Jarlaxle’s shoulders, hands, mouth. His face somewhere between bemusement and dismay.
“No.”
“Is that a surrender?”
“No.” Dizzily, Entreri raises his dagger to point at Jarlaxle, who looks as though he might laugh. The shard has already disappeared.
“Ah, my friend—”
“So much for winning a fight without it,” Entreri snaps. “Is that your weapon of last resort now? Why not begin with it, if you don’t intend to win fairly? Can you not pass your own test?”
“Are you so sore at losing—”
“I didn’t lose.”
“Indeed?”
“No, I didn't. You’re playing a different game.”
“And what would that be?”
His head is ringing. “The insects in Basadoni’s garden will give you greater satisfaction, if all you wish to prove is that you can crush them. They won’t get back up.”
“That isn’t what I—”
“Of course it is,” Entreri says. And, in a rush of spite, “How like a drow.”
He doesn't know how he knew to say that. It knocks the words out of Jarlaxle's mouth.
What follows is silence, in which Jarlaxle considers him and he looks back.
“Not at all,” Jarlaxle says. Quiet, subdued. “Not at all.”
Jarlaxle touches the pouch at his side, weighing it in his palm. Slowly, contemplatively, he unties the fastening which holds it on his belt. Entreri watches him carry the pouch across the room, and set it down on the sunny windowsill.
Then Jarlaxle turns about and holds up both hands, empty. As if that could make him seem less dangerous.
“Why don't we begin again?”
Again.
Chapter 3
Notes:
There's some jumping around in time, starting in this chapter.
Like Kimmuriel, the Rai'gy in this story isn't very canonical, because ‘extremely racist megalomaniac’ isn't actually an entire character.
Sphairai are a kind of ancient Greek boxing gloves that sometimes had blades in them. Chessenta is a cluster of city-states with a heavy ancient Greek flavour. I imagine the martial styles practised in Calimport would be pretty diverse.
Chapter Text
“The surface. The surface.”
Kimmuriel tilts his head back. The hot water laps at his neck and the base of his skull. His hair drifts around his face.
Rai’gy sits on the steps nearby, the water up to his waist. There are no other lieutenants in the baths at this hour.
Menzoberranzan is quiet tonight, but Bregan D’aerthe’s headquarters boil with the news of their next venture. Kimmuriel can hear them in the barracks and the tunnels. Horrified, excited.
“I might have guessed,” Rai’gy says. “He’s been squandering my time on that human for weeks.”
Kimmuriel is weary and speaking is inefficient. He would pluck the information out of Rai’gy’s mind, but Rai’gy would be offended. He says aloud, “Human?”
“An assassin.”
“In Calimport.”
“Yes.”
“So you have seen the southlands.”
“Too much,” Rai’gy says. “And that city, it’s hellish—the sunlight is horrid, the streets are foul, it's choked with humans. On the edge of a desert, dust everywhere. I’ve seen corners of the Abyss I’d rather visit.”
Kimmuriel sits up. “How encouraging.”
“What’s more, someone may do away with this human before we can make use of him. All the guilds in Calimport have declared him an untouchable. There’s an execution order on his head.”
“Then we will be called upon to intervene.”
“Probably.”
Rising out of the water, Kimmuriel pulls a towel from the other side of the room and manipulates it to fold around him. Rai’gy follows, but he utters a word and curls his hand, and the moisture flies from him like rain falling upward. Naked, he runs his fingers through his short, gleaming hair.
Kimmuriel says, “Have there been other surface expeditions?” He dries himself with a brief, hot excitation of energy. His skin flushes.
“Brief forays—no more than a day or two.” They both begin to dress.
“Advance planning?”
“Hm. Some of them were for information gathering, I’d guess.” Rai’gy pauses now and then to eat from the nearby tray. Since Bregan D’aerthe began importing wheat flour from the surface, the fashion for eating leavened bread among the nobility has become almost fanatical. Rai’gy enjoys it with caviar.
“He has been thinking about this for a while,” Kimmuriel says. “He commissioned maps several months ago. Two hundred and forty-four gold pieces, in the accounts. Maps of Calimport, presumably.”
“Maybe.”
“And his library is full of surface literature.”
Rai’gy shrugs. “He’s been curious about the surface for as long as I’ve known him. It never lasts.”
The comb lifts from Kimmuriel’s belongings. It begins to stroke briskly through his hair. “But now there is a financial imperative. We have often said that the current arrangement is not sustainable. Demand is climbing too quickly. We cannot continue to purchase from surface merchants who charge a matron’s ransom to transport goods here, and another for the privilege.”
“We’ll be hiding behind humans,” Rai’gy says, “human agents, human brokers. He’s made the calculations over and over; he should know it’s too great a risk. We all know, don’t we, any investment on the surface will be squandered by inferior creatures when they inevitably fail.”
“Evidently he believes this one is not inferior.”
“This one?” Rai’gy sneers. “He’s unaffiliated. His former guild has disowned him. Every creature in Calimport is terrified of him. He has no allies. I can’t imagine a worse individual to front us in foreign, hostile territory.”
Quirks of energy part Kimmuriel's hair into three thick strands and braid them together. He is thinking. “Does Jarlaxle seem interested in him?”
“Yes.” Rai’gy pulls on his robe. His thoughts are waspish and irritable. “Yes, very interested.” He sighs. “Damn.”
“He has been bored and restless for a while. Something like this was inevitable.”
Jarlaxle’s boredom is the shadow on that brilliant mind. In pursuit of amusement he experiments, recklessly. He spends evenings in seedy gambling dens and takes lovers in quick succession. He keeps unusual hours, and goes wandering in the Clawrift’s tunnels at night. His attendants grumble silently at requests for raw dakhree fish, Death’s Head wine, or salted cheese from the surface. Yesterday a dozen sketches for new enchanted items appeared on Kimmuriel’s desk, flanked by that elegant hand growing slanted and urgent. It has been months of this antic, scattered activity. Kimmuriel suspects only he is aware of how chronic it is.
“Well, the human isn’t going to hold his interest,” Rai’gy declares. “He’ll tire of him quickly.”
“A human is not difficult to control, at least.”
“Wait till you meet him,” Rai’gy says. “You might think differently.”
He helps himself to more bread and caviar as Kimmuriel secures his braid.
“All right, let’s go and see our illustrious leader—if he’s not whoring in West Wall again.”
Their first day in Calimport is chaotic.
Walking through the subterranean basement of the guildhouse, Kimmuriel finds the doors to Jarlaxle’s quarters open. Light leans into the corridor. He can see part of the receiving room, cramped with crates and furniture.
He raps his knuckles on the door. Jarlaxle bustles into view, holding an assortment of curious objects, and grins at him.
“Ah, do come in, my friend. If you can pick your way through, that is.”
Kimmuriel steps between piled crates and shuts the door behind him, which muffles the psychic chatter. As always, it is both pleasant and unsettling to be in the presence of a mind he cannot hear.
His skull feels as though it might crack like a stone.
Jarlaxle returns, unencumbered. “You’re settling in well?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Yes, Rai’gy has already informed me of his complaints.”
“I am sure they are many and various.”
A laugh. “Of course they are. How are you faring?”
“The psychoportation circle was… taxing.”
Jarlaxle turns a chair about. “Sit, sit.” He joins Kimmuriel at a pedestal table with a top made of coloured glass. “Because of the distance?”
“And the number of entities,” Kimmuriel says. “The integrity of the manifestation is difficult to maintain when soldiers are passing through it six or eight at a time.”
Jarlaxle rests his chin in his hand. His eye is admiring. “Remarkable, truly. Anyone else would have had to cast that circle at least ten times—we’d have been waiting days, it would have cost a fortune. It’s no wonder, really, that you regard other forms of magic as limited.”
“Psionic abilities are superior in all respects.”
“Except they take quite a toll, don’t they? I don’t need to be concerned about finding Rai’gy seizing on the floor of his quarters with blood all over his face. Whereas you… well, you look very tired, my friend.”
Jarlaxle has not forgotten the incident six months ago. It was not the first time an experiment had gone awry, but it was a dramatic loss of control.
Kimmuriel nods, conceding. “Moving half an army and forty shipments across thousands of miles is not trivial.”
“You’ll forgive me,” Jarlaxle says. “When I’m presented with such power it seems a waste not to use it—”
“I am aware.”
“—but it isn’t my intention to work you to the bone. I’m not your mother.”
Kimmuriel feels himself begin to smile, and consciously allows it. “Fortunately.”
“You’re not the first prodigy to join our band, but you are the first psion. It’s quite possible that I might apply pressure without a proper sense of consequence.” Jarlaxle leans back, arm slung over the chair. “Do you remember the first thing you said, when you came round from that seizure? You were barely conscious, you couldn’t even sit up, and you said to Rai’gy, Tell Jarlaxle I will have the wand finished in an hour. I’m sure you meant it, too.”
“That was… not rational.”
“You keep challenging yourself. Which is admirable—and, yes, useful to me. But you must inform me if I push you too far. Your position here isn’t precarious, or contingent on doing what I command regardless of cost. You’re not a slave, or a mithral mine to be plundered until it’s exhausted.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
Jarlaxle rises, and walks behind him. His shoulders prickle, as if in expectation of something.
“I’m aware, of course, that being here on the surface will impose a certain strain on you, and the rest of the men.”
Kimmuriel turns to look at him. There, on Jarlaxle’s wall, is a vast map of Calimport. It is inked in exacting detail—every ward, every sabban, every drudach and street. The labels are in Common; he can translate a few.
The impression is not complexity, but chaos. A thing writhing, like serpents.
Jarlaxle grins. “It’s a remarkable city, isn’t it?”
“It is—loud.” Menzoberranzan seems by comparison a silent paradise. He wishes, fervently, to be far underground, where it is quiet and there are no humans.
“Ah, yes,” Jarlaxle says. “Quite a contrast with where we’ve come from—did you know there are a million people living here? Incredible, one can barely imagine the infrastructure required to—” Pain slices into Kimmuriel’s forehead. His eyes blur. “Kimmuriel?”
“It is nothing. I am—”
“Exhausted,” Jarlaxle says. He taps a fingertip against his cheek, blinking thoughtfully. Then he goes out of view.
He returns with a bundle of thick parchment. Inside, a round cake of a dark brown substance, like soft tar. “Opium,” he says. “It comes from the opium poppy flower. Very potent.”
“What is it for?”
“I believe humans have a number of recreational uses for it—they’re fond of smoking it here—but notably it’s very good for pain. I suspect there’d be a market for it in Menzoberranzan, but the vendors are unscrupulous even by our standards.”
Kimmuriel nods. “Very well.”
“All right. I’ll put it in water for you.”
Jarlaxle steps around the corner. As he goes, Kimmuriel sees the pouch on his belt, which has become a fixture about his person.
There is a rising glug of fluid poured from one vessel to another, and then a clink of glass. The water Jarlaxle brings to him is stained tannic brown. “Take it slowly.”
“Thank you.” Kimmuriel sips it, and finds it bitter. “Have you learned more of the shard?”
“Ah, yes,” Jarlaxle says. “A different kind of mind magic. Yes, I believe I’m making good progress with it.”
“Be careful. Even my family—reckless as they were—exercised caution around such artefacts; and that one is very old.”
“My dear Kimmuriel, when am I not careful?”
“Too often,” Kimmuriel says, but he answers Jarlaxle’s smile with his own, slightly.
Jarlaxle’s gaze flickers to his mouth, and then over his face. If anyone else looked at him in such a manner, he would burn the image out of them like parchment; but he is used to Jarlaxle’s possessiveness. It is not weighty or controlling—indeed, it allows him greater freedom than the other subordinates, who warrant no interest. Jarlaxle's favour comes with many privileges.
“May I?” He lets Jarlaxle take his sleeve, and inspect the fabric. Jarlaxle’s fingertips graze his wrist.
“These robes are too heavy for this heat,” Jarlaxle says. “I’ll have some lighter ones made and sent to your rooms. Silk, I think—and cotton. And some shirts and such.”
“If you are tempted to buy something ostentatious—”
“I’ll save that for Rai’gy, he’s far more appreciative.”
“The lack of drow tailors might prove an obstacle.”
“I have your measurements.” Jarlaxle lets go, eyes full of mirth. “I’ll make do.”
Kimmuriel frowns. “As we will not be staying long—”
“Yes, yes—as we agreed. Although I must confess, the possibilities are tremendous—access to markets we’ve never had before, the sheer variety of goods we might consider trading…”
“Jarlaxle.”
“Not to worry, my friend.” He never feels so transparent as when Jarlaxle is smiling at him. “You’ll be home before long.”
Jarlaxle’s desires are vast and multitudinous. Even if he could perceive Jarlaxle’s mind they would be beyond his fathoming. He knows only that he is a focal point, one of several, and that the desire lies between them like a question—but what he believes the answer to be reveals more of him than the man looking at him with such keen, invigorated interest.
“The pasha’s library is on the third floor, by the way. There’s a handful of volumes in there that might interest you.”
“Thank you.”
“Now—the sun will be down soon. First meeting is at nightfall. All of us.”
“And Entreri?” He was introduced to the human—dragged from an immolated building—some hours ago. The distaste has lingered.
“For now, Entreri is one of us, or near enough. Which means that—to be explicit—if you do anything to him, I’ll not look kindly on it. Is that understood?”
One of us. “It is.”
“I went to great trouble to secure him and his cooperation. I won’t have that effort wasted.”
“And if he attacks me?”
Jarlaxle shrugs. “Then I won’t stand in the way when you kill him.”
A month later, the human threatens him in his own quarters.
As Entreri leaves, Kimmuriel lets his hands drop from his sleeves to his sides. His pulse is rapid. Unusual—but it is a side effect of the city's psychic noise, no doubt. Entreri is not capable of provoking such a response.
He sits down, and gathers himself. The task before him is trivial, not worth his effort, but the order comes from Jarlaxle. He straightens his back, his feet flat on the floor, his hands upon his thighs. Breathing deeply, he reaches out with his mind.
His surroundings begin to hum deeply. He knows the room well by now, its familiar topography of energy. Old objects and new; and the leavings of several minds. The jittery human wizard, whose thoughts smell like aniseed; five soldiers with blunt, rattling minds, carrying furniture out. And Entreri, who—
He will not think of that.
The guild’s soldiers sleep and take meals in two separate buildings. The thieves and street-runners come and go from another. They number around four hundred.
Humans are brutish and stupid. That is the common wisdom among drow, and it is borne out by the vapid, clangorous noise he has been enduring for tendays. Now their thoughts suck at him: their shallow appetites, their watery anxieties, their petty drivel about wages, debts, climbing ranks, sickly children, displeased gods, territorial feuds, toothache, sex—
He extricates himself, and goes on.
An hour later, his neck is stiff with frustration.
Everywhere he looks, he sees Artemis Entreri: feared, hated, desired, dreaded, admired. The city bubbles with rumours about him; the guild is fixated by him. In the common imagination, there is no limit to what he might do. He is half myth, half nightmare.
It is impossible that these stupid, superstitious creatures have nothing else to occupy them—that they must endlessly wonder about Entreri.
It does not matter. He will have the answer soon.
Dawn comes, but he is too restless to take reverie. He climbs the stair with a book for shelving in the pasha’s library.
Across the corridor, the entrance to the training hall is an archway; and beyond the archway, two shadows merge and clash on the floor.
He blinks, and Entreri appears.
The human rakes his hair back with his fingers, then draws his dagger again. His mind is hot and buzzing. Opposite him, Jarlaxle passes into a slanting sunbeam, laughing as he fends off Entreri’s sword.
The light is painful. Kimmuriel looks away.
It would be wise to take reverie, but he returns to scrying.
The soldiers are changing shifts. He moves impatiently through the barracks, slipping from one dull mind to the next. He finds them chewing tobacco like cud and muttering—of course—about Entreri.
Only months after Punjor and all that lot of them, and now this—
Later, as the sun sinks, Kimmuriel scatters his perception through the pickpockets, informants, and thugs handing in their paltry earnings. They lie to their masters and exchange gossip.
They're saying that Basadoni's dead and Entreri did him in—
By nightfall, news of the failed assassination has spread through the ranks like infection. A wave of fear, and on its heels, rumours—
Entreri killed that servant himself—
Entreri found out who did it with dark magic—
Entreri's going to get rid of everybody he thinks is disloyal, going to take out their souls and—
Everywhere, everywhere, that—
Kimmuriel opens his eyes. He is breathing sharply. Glass glints on the floor.
One of his devices lies smashed across the flagstones. It is the psionic foci, with its mounted lenses. The wooden frame has been cracked almost in half, as if struck with great force. He does not recall doing it.
He gathers up the pieces without touching them. It is possible, he reflects, that he is angry.
The next morning, emerging from the pasha’s library, he hears it again. People reverberate in Jarlaxle's presence. Entreri’s mind is in that hall, reverberating.
Then Entreri walks past the archway. The front of his leather jerkin is open and the garment underneath is dark with sweat around the neck. His skin shines with it, in the hollow of his throat. Kimmuriel has never viewed brown skin closely before. The way it reflects light is—curious.
Jarlaxle’s voice comes nearer:
“—train with other weapons?”
“Yes,” Entreri replies. “I began with the quarterstaff.” The sound of running water, and then splashing.
“Not to your taste?”
“An advantage of reach, easy to reposition from high to low lines. But my line of work requires blades. There is no substitute.”
“Have you always fought in the two-handed style?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re trained in ranged weapons as well, I assume?”
“Knives, darts, throwing stars. Longbow, shortbow, crossbow.”
Metal, clinking. “What are these?”
“Sphairai, for bare-handed fighting. The Calishite-made commonly have iron plates. The Chessentan variant has spikes.”
“You must have spent quite some time training here.”
At once, Entreri’s mind darkens like an ink stain. “Time enough.”
Without warning, the human moves into the corridor, and Kimmuriel takes an involuntary step back.
“Get out of my way.”
Entreri is taller and stockier, and anger gives his movements vigour. Kimmuriel can smell him—musky sweat, warm leather. It is difficult to suppress a shiver of disgust.
“Do not speak to me, iblith.” He rarely uses the Common tongue, and it lacks a word with the same degree of insult as the Drow.
Entreri presses his lips together, his eyes full of threat. “You know my name. Poor as your grasp of the Common tongue may be, you’re capable of pronouncing that, I hope.”
Behind Entreri, Kimmuriel sees Jarlaxle watching them, fascinated. His throat tightens.
“I do not name vermin,” he says.
“Lieutenant?”
The blade of energy dissipates. Kimmuriel puts aside the crystal, brushing greenish dust from his fingers. “Come.”
The soldier enters his quarters, and bows as well as one might while carrying a crate. “Here’s the last of the items you requested, sir.”
“Good.” He points to the nearby workbench. “Put them there.” More soldiers file in, hefting crates. “Handle them carefully.”
For three tendays, he believed this horrid escapade on the surface would soon be over. When it was clear it would not, he sent for some items from his quarters in Menzoberranzan, including twenty-six volumes from his library. If he must sojourn in hell, he will have proper reading material.
The soldiers depart with the empty crates. Tiredly, Kimmuriel glances over the bookstacks.
He pauses upon a thick, dark volume: Graquon’s Treatise on the Psychology of Humans, written by a drow arcanist. It is a century old, but its insights into humans—limited in their cognitive abilities and lacking in impulse control, relative to elves—remain unchallenged in the scholarly literature. For five years, Graquon kept more than forty human subjects in secure confinement. He documented the results of presenting them with simple and complex tasks, as well as studying their behaviour in captivity.
The methodology was flawed, however—fatally so. Kimmuriel turns the pages. They are possessed of no proper intelligence, Graquon wrote of his subjects, but a kind of deviousness. At first, the humans tried to bargain with their captor. When he did not relent, they grew moody and combative. Then, realising their time was running short, they became desperate—unpredictable. Finally, Graquon erred, and they broke out of their confinement. Graquon’s work was published posthumously.
It occurs to Kimmuriel that they are carrying out a similar experiment here in Calimport—but with a far more dangerous subject.
Entreri knows how all this will end. His very nature is an insult too great to be allowed. He is insubordinate, manipulative, and unpredictable. He has left a wake of ruin and dead drow behind him. Bregan D'aerthe soldiers would line up to put a sword through him. Rai'gy has graphic fantasies of his head on a spike. And his last defence is Jarlaxle, who is distracted and inconstant—no defence at all.
Thus, Entreri is alone. He is cornered. He is desperate. But he is not like Graquon’s cowed, ordinary humans. He is a different kind of thing entirely.
The yellowed pages of the treatise are still moving. Kimmuriel hardly knew he was doing it. He stops, and flattens the page.
Before the lengthy afterword, there is a single dated entry. The last sentence that Graquon wrote, before his subjects rioted.
The human mind tends toward the base and the extreme; and never more so than when the subject is deprived of liberty, or believes itself to be trapped...
“Is he fucking him?”
Kimmuriel sits, arranging his robes upon the chair. Rai’gy becomes crude when he is angry.
“I do not believe so,” he says.
“I’d almost prefer it if he were,” Rai’gy says. “It would be more explicable than… whatever he’s doing.”
“And Sharlotta?”
Kimmuriel laments, yet again, that he must pay any mind to their leader’s sexual proclivities.
“One of his diversions—I doubt she’ll last the month. Besides, his interest in Entreri is different, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps.” Disquiet creeps through his chest.
Rai’gy’s familiar, the imp, offers up a tray of drinks. Kimmuriel levitates the teacup down to the table. Rai’gy takes the wineglass, grinning.
“You’re sure you won’t…”
“Yes.” He does not consume alcohol. It interferes with his power.
“As you like.” Rai’gy takes an indulgent sip. “So, Jarlaxle has you cooperating with him. Is that a deliberate insult, or—”
Kimmuriel lifts the cup to his lips. He has taken to drinking the local black tea, made with camellia leaves. It tastes clean and bitter. “The insult is incidental. It is a game.”
“He likes those. All of us jostling for a foothold.”
“He has never before allowed a human to play, I assume.”
“Not to my knowledge. But now I have to watch that vermin creep around him as if it has any right to be here. You might as well invite a beast to sit at a dinner table.”
“A beast would be preferable,” Kimmuriel says. “It would not be able to speak.”
Rai’gy rubs his forehead. “You know, I thought it was just a necessity, using them as a front. But it’s not only that. He likes them, he’s interested in them. The very fact that he’s elevated one of them, that he lets Entreri counsel him at all—”
“Entreri will not last.”
“Entreri should already be dead, and we should be taking our leave of this place. Instead Jarlaxle’s set on expansion. It’s the very definition of madness.”
“Jarlaxle’s decisions often appear illogical, at first.”
“Of course—that’s always been his way. But this—this is unprecedented. He means to make our presence here permanent, he wants to be king of this horrid place, this hellish sewer—”
“I do not approve of it any more than you do.”
“And yet he seems not to realise that it’s folly. You’ve heard him—‘a matter of absorption’—“ Rai’gy gestures with the glass in his hand. “There are a million humans in this city. Stupid as they are, they’ll descend on us with a vengeance if we’re discovered.”
“I have counselled him against this course.”
“So have I, for all that it’s fallen on deaf ears. But he listens to Entreri…”
Kimmuriel recalls Jarlaxle's hand on that pouch; the preoccupied look. “And what of the shard?”
“We know scarcely anything about it,” Rai’gy says, quickly. “He was behaving irrationally even before it came into his possession. Gods, he had me waste healing spells on a halfling.”
“In order to obtain the shard.”
“But going after Drizzt Do’Urden—arranging that fight? That wasn’t for the shard, that was for Entreri.”
“Entreri is merely an inconvenience.” If only that were true. “The shard may be ruinous.”
“Only in the wrong hands,” Rai’gy says. He has been curious about the shard all along. “Well, it’s clear we need more information. What do you think you can extract?”
“From Entreri?”
“Yes. What can you get from him?”
“Whatever he knows,” Kimmuriel says, feeling vicious. “Whatever I please.”
“—screaming like a banshee, and proceeded to hurl herself—truly, with gusto—hurl herself into the bath.”
An attendant admits Kimmuriel to Jarlaxle’s rooms the next evening. The door to the sitting room is halfway open. Jarlaxle’s voice filters out, speaking Common.
“Which was quite unexpected, I’m sure you can appreciate. Anyway, she came up spitting all manner of terrible curses, drenched through, and absolutely refused to get out of the water for fear we’d set her on fire.”
“That doesn’t seem unwarranted.” Entreri’s voice, quiet.
The attendant is about to speak. Kimmuriel mutes him and sends him to kneel in a cupboard.
Quietly, he approaches the door.
Jarlaxle is reclining on the couch, holding a wine glass on his lap. Not a foot away, Entreri leans forward in an armchair, elbows rested on his knees. Jarlaxle is focused on him—engagement in the curve of his mouth, the angle of his neck, his slow-blinking eye.
Kimmuriel has been forced to interrupt Jarlaxle during sex half a dozen times. Spying on this seems a greater trespass. It is not comfortable, precisely—Entreri’s thoughts are a stir of wariness and amusement—but the rapport between them has a disconcerting intensity.
“Yes,” Jarlaxle says, “I’ll admit that Fal’ryn is, ah, impulsive when it comes to priestesses, having had it worse than most of my men, so the matron’s caution was perhaps understandable. Consequently, she negotiated the future of her House from my bathtub.”
“What was the outcome.”
“Oh, very pleasing. I took possession of half of her soldiers, and one of her sons—the useful one—and most of her treasury. She kept her head, and was not ignominiously replaced by her eldest daughter, and no bodies were removed from my bath. An amicable exchange, in all.”
“I’m sure,” Entreri drawls. His mind lightens and colours with levity.
“Ah, such difficult work, but someone has to do it. Have you ever—”
Entreri pinches the bridge of his nose. “Have I ever killed someone in a bath.”
“Yes.”
“Obviously.”
Jarlaxle’s smile widens, rapt. “Really? Do tell—”
In a burst, Kimmuriel raps on the door and enters before he is acknowledged.
He does not imagine the dismay—or annoyance—in Jarlaxle’s eyes. Sudden and dark, like a warning. “Oh, Kimmuriel. Come in.”
Entreri has straightened. He is exuding hostility.
Bitterly, Kimmuriel says, “I have received Valas’s report regarding the situation with Baenre.”
“Ah,” Jarlaxle says, like a leaden weight. “Very well.” He turns back to Entreri. “Tomorrow morning?”
Entreri takes the cue and starts to leave. “If you like.”
“Good.” The brilliant smile again, briefly. Jarlaxle’s gaze follows Entreri out.
Without moving, Kimmuriel closes the door. Then it is the two of them alone.
Jarlaxle faces him, mouth flat, eye inexpressive. It is the boredom Kimmuriel has come to dread over the last year; but Jarlaxle has never before directed it at him.
“Well—proceed.”
Chapter Text
“Who are you?”
“You already know, I’m sure.”
He had the look of a genius or a conman. His mind was entirely obscure.
“Jarlaxle.”
“The same.” With a bow and a sweep of his hat, “at your service.”
Grinning, the man walked out of Kimmuriel’s bedchamber; out of House Oblodra.
A tenday later, Jarlaxle returned.
Kimmuriel was constructing a psionic focus. He looked up from his workbench to see Jarlaxle closing his door.
“You have not approached my brothers,” he said. They were incapable of secrets. Matron K'yorl had seen to that.
“No, indeed,” Jarlaxle said, and bowed deeply, mocking Kimmuriel’s lack of greeting.
“Why?”
“No use to me. Your mother does tend to break her things, doesn’t she?”
“I have no more ability than they.”
“Is that why you’ve been buying gallroot in such large quantities? To suppress all that power you don’t have?”
Alarm crept along Kimmuriel's nerves. He forced himself to concentrate on his work. “Gallroot has several uses.”
“Not for psionicists.” At the corner of his eye, Jarlaxle ran a hand along the workbench. “Rumour has it, the Oblodran noble family has been much depleted by ghastly experiments and being hunted by illithids. Most have been thoroughly subjugated by the matron, and the rest are without talent. But here you are, trying to tamp yours down.”
When Kimmuriel looked up again, Jarlaxle was grinning.
“Fear not,” Jarlaxle said. “I’ll keep your secret.”
“Because you want something.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Jarlaxle came closer, much closer, and leaned against the workbench. “Even you, while hiding in your own house.” His thigh almost touched Kimmuriel’s arm. “So, indulge me—how powerful are you?”
Jarlaxle might tell K’yorl, or kill him for the Baenres. And yet, staring up at that provocative, grinning face, something made him say:
“I am exceptional.”
“Good,” Jarlaxle said. In his eye, something hungry. “Then let me make you an offer.”
The visits did not stop. At times it seemed Jarlaxle trespassed into the House merely for conversation.
“Hello, Kimmuriel.”
He glanced up, but went on healing his bruised wrist. Lessons in psychokinesis with Izyr, his tutor, often ended in injury. “Jarlaxle. You have seen the matron, I assume.”
“She wants rather more from us than I’m willing to give—always a tense negotiation.” Jarlaxle sat down on his bed. “But, as a happy byproduct, I can visit one of my most interesting prospects.”
“Who has already turned down your offer.”
“For now,” Jarlaxle says. “We can still be useful and friendly to one another. Here—fresh gallroot.”
“I already have a supplier.”
“And who do you think supplies your supplier? We’ve found a new source for plants originating in the southlands—this is more potent than what you’ve been using.”
Kimmuriel took the pouch from him. “Thank you.”
“How are the side effects?”
“Variable.”
“The risk of damage—”
“I am aware.”
“Don’t ruin yourself before I can use you, Kimmuriel.”
It was so presumptuous he could not suppress a smile. “Leave, rogue.”
—because I forge things. Hazaufein's annoyance had a tenor like teeth gnawing. Can he not manage a more creative insult than ‘dwarf’?
In her wisdom, Matron K’yorl had ruined both of his brothers, despite neither possessing any formidable talent. Drizfryn had grown into a thuggish delinquent; Hazaufein, a mediocre wizard who shook with panic when she was near. Both their minds yawned open.
Nonetheless, Kimmuriel shared an understanding with his eldest brother; a certain affinity. They often spent time together, walking the cloisters of their grand, ancient House.
No, Kimmuriel replied. They stood in the west quadrangle, watching the scintillae of faerie light. It took him years to muster that.
Wisps of mirth between them. If—two hundred years from now—he comes up with something new, we will mark the day with celebration.
A great occasion for our family.
Perhaps I will forge something in his honour. Like a plaque reading ‘idiot’.
Beneath them, around them, the House communed—a mind of minds, the wild, glorious, pulsing consciousness Kimmuriel had felt since he was very young. Immense, and infinite.
Even before they met, Jarlaxle was known to him.
K’yorl had bestowed the memory to him as though it were the performance of a great drama—how she made chaos of a holy Lolthite ritual in her rival's House. The ritual was botched, the secondboy destroyed, the priestesses scattered by hysteria. Militant even in her panic, Matron Yvonnel Baenre ordered the boy drowned in the great lake.
Decades later, Jarlaxle of Bregan D’aerthe came to House Oblodra to offer services. K’yorl knew him immediately.
“The most tolerable of them,” she said to Kimmuriel once. “Pretty, clever thing. But still a Baenre.”
Baenre, their greatest enemy. Jarlaxle, however, was a curiosity—brazen and brilliant, deliberately cultivating Kimmuriel's interest.
“Why do you wear that?”
“This?” Jarlaxle tapped his eyepatch. “Why, dear Kimmuriel, to keep you guessing.”
“A human? What next—intelligence gathering by bugbears?”
The first time he heard the name ‘Artemis Entreri’, they were sitting in his workroom.
“Now there’s a thought,” Jarlaxle said. “No—we are using a particular human to solve a particular problem. Vierna Do’Urden believes he can manage her brother.”
“Improbable, if Drizzt is as good as they say.”
“Truthfully, it hardly matters. If he can distract Drizzt long enough for us to capture him, that’s well and good, saves risking my men. If it all goes awry and Drizzt comes for us in retaliation, better to pin it on an insubordinate human, you see?”
“I will not repeat for you the saying about sending a human to do a drow’s work, as—”
“Good, because that would be very tiresome. Entreri is just a convenient means to an end.”
“Entreri.”
“Artemis Entreri—the human’s name.”
“I would not trouble to remember it.”
“He’ll not survive long, true—but he may be useful while he yet lives.”
“If only to demonstrate the inferiority of his kind.”
“My friend, have you ever met a human?”
“No,” Kimmuriel said. “But I have read of them.”
“Oh?”
Kimmuriel ran his gaze along the uppermost shelf. He pulled the volume in question down to his hand and gave it to Jarlaxle. “To my knowledge, this is the first rigorous behavioural study of humans. Graquon kept human subjects in a tightly controlled captivity for five years. It is all the proof you need that they are lesser creatures, little more than cattle.”
“Fascinating. May I borrow this?”
“If you wish. Frankly they are not worth the parchment Graquon devotes to them.”
“Coincidentally, I was contemplating an experiment of my own. Not dissimilar to Graquon’s, it seems, albeit on a much smaller scale.”
“Tell me your findings,” Kimmuriel said. “I doubt I will be surprised.”
“Kimmuriel?”
It nearly echoed. “Good evening,” he said. “I would stand, but—”
The blur—Jarlaxle—sat beside him on the couch. “My friend, you’re bleeding.”
“Yes.” A warm sluice on his upper lip and his neck. Nosebleeds were common among psions, but bleeding out of his ears was distantly worrisome. It signified damage. “I am quite depleted.”
“Why?”
“My tutor has accelerated my training in metaconcerted telepathy.”
“Pardon?”
“He has been demanding the use of my power. It is difficult to keep it concealed when he is attempting to draw on it directly—the nature of the manifestation is sufficiently invasive that he—”
He was talking too much.
“Why the urgency?”
“My mother needs psions for her use. My siblings are not sufficient.”
“So she’s short on fuel. And planning something, evidently.”
“Yes.”
“Would ordinary healing have any effect?”
“I do not know.”
“Let’s give it a try.” Jarlaxle took out a pale sphere, one of his trinkets. Kimmuriel heard chanting; he recognised it as Elvish. Illegal magic—of course.
The sensation was gentle. A slow immersion, as if into water.
“Kimmuriel.”
Time reconstituted. He was lying down, a cushion under his head. “Apologies,” he murmured, “I was—”
“Not at all.”
He sent his mind over to the workbench—spikes of pain—and felt along its surface for the familiar imprint, scattering papers and instruments. “Where is my—”
“This?” He felt the crystal in Jarlaxle’s hand, as if Jarlaxle had clasped his face. The hot shape of a palm, the fine whorls of Jarlaxle's fingerprints on its sides. “What is it?”
“A psicrystal. A—reservoir.”
“It’s rather beautiful.” Jarlaxle passed it over, and he began tugging energy from it.
“It has been in my family a long time.” It was filled with the psychic echoes of every ancestor who had possessed it. A soft susurrus of Oblodrans musing and calculating and dreaming.
“Sentimental value?”
“I am not sentimental.”
“Of course,” Jarlaxle said.
“Have you reconsidered my offer?”
Kimmuriel opened his eyes. “I am a scholar, not a mercenary.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Before Jarlaxle entered, he had been drifting in the Astral Sea—in a demiplane where he could uncinch his power in secret. Dark except for the distant silver wash of thousands of stars.
He sat up. His body felt heavy and unwieldy. “I have no interest in spycraft, or House warfare. Here, I can pursue my research in peace, without Lolthites demanding fealty at every turn.”
“Everyone pays fealty to someone, my friend. They’re already demanding your power—how long until they use you for breeding?”
Kimmuriel flinched. “They will not.”
“Really? I’ve not known your family to make exceptions—they need all the progeny they can get. When they learn you’re the most powerful child they’ve produced in generations, do you think they’ll simply let you be? Or do you think you’ll be treated like a prize rothé?”
“No.” But of course Jarlaxle was right.
“How long do you think you can hide yourself? You’re shorter on time than even you know.”
“Do not threaten me, Jarlaxle.”
“Oh, no. Your family is doing that. I’m merely underlining it.” That smile. “This can’t last—you know that.”
A tenday later, Lolth fell silent, and magic failed.
“Why are you here?”
Kimmuriel reached for his robe, pulling it on. He did not wonder how Jarlaxle could enter the House undetected, even without arcane trickery.
“Are you surprised?” Jarlaxle said.
A roiling, shimmering, whispering aura hung about Jarlaxle’s head. His mind, Kimmuriel realised with a shock. There was nothing to hide it any longer.
Kimmuriel did not risk prying, despite his curiosity. He needed no sensitivity to know that Jarlaxle was agitated. They both were.
Jarlaxle said, “You’re aware, I assume, that K’yorl assassinated a matron mother last night.”
Dread lay like freezing water in Kimmuriel’s stomach. “Faen Tlabbar. She gloated about it at length.”
Jarlaxle nodded. “By all accounts she’s wanted to do it for a very long time. And Baenre is next, yes?”
“Inevitably.”
“Menzoberranzan ruled by your mother looks rather different, I imagine. She came to ask for—well, demand—my loyalty, ahead of her great coup.”
“She has a drug Faen Tlabbar use to make their men obedient,” Kimmuriel said. It was long past the time when they might have bargained for this information. “I believe you are the intended subject.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” Jarlaxle said. “You’ll forgive me—but I don’t intend to be your mother’s vapid, servile consort.”
“She considers you valuable enough to let you live, at least.”
“Charming. You see, this is why your House has no friends and few allies.”
“You need not enumerate her faults,” Kimmuriel said. “I am quite aware of them.”
“I’m sure.” Jarlaxle’s amusement hardened into scrutiny. “How are you faring?”
Kimmuriel knew how he looked: sunken-eyed and dishevelled, with his hair undone. “If K’yorl finds me out,” he said, “she will do to me what she has done to my siblings. Unless magic returns first, in which event we will all be destroyed by vengeful Lolthites. How does one choose between such appealing prospects?”
“You still have your humour, at least.”
“I would rather keep my mind and my life.”
“Then you’re escaping, yes?”
In truth, he had not decided. Even then, in the face of K’yorl’s destructive hubris, he was reluctant to abandon the House—this quiet, sequestered place, full of ancient learning. The only part of the city not fouled by Lolth and her fanatics. “I may.”
“Where will you go?”
“If I tell you, it will be the first thing K’yorl plucks out of your mind when next you encounter her.”
“Isn’t that pleasant to contemplate.”
They stared at each other. Jarlaxle’s smile was vexed, for once.
He touched Kimmuriel’s shoulder. “Well, my friend—when the dust settles, if you are yet living and I have not been reduced to a witless, snivelling lackey, my offer will still stand. Bear it in mind.”
“Goodbye, Jarlaxle.”
Kimmuriel remained.
On the fifteenth day of Marpenoth, K’yorl tried to assassinate Matron Baenre.
She returned to the compound as Narbondel was lighting. She did not speak to anyone.
Fear crawled through the House. In his workroom, Kimmuriel began to pack.
It was like going blind and deaf. The book he was holding dropped from his hands. He could not remember the House ever being so silent.
“Kimmuriel!”
A black, spitting doorway had opened in the middle of his workroom. Jarlaxle stood on the other side of it, with a male in a high-collared robe Kimmuriel did not know.
Evidently, the House defences had failed. Evidently, magic had returned.
The book was on the floor, spine bent back. He began to reach for it with his power, but could not. Like a limb that had gone to sleep—pins and needles behind his eyes.
“Baenre are on their way,” Jarlaxle said, as if they were not his benefactors and kin. “Your time here has run out. I warned you it would.”
“You did,” Kimmuriel said.
He stood up. He could not sense anything. His power was inert; he did not know why.
“Kimmuriel.” Jarlaxle was stepping through the doorway, hand outreached. “My friend, if you wish not to die in the next several minutes, you’ll come with us now.”
No, Kimmuriel thought; but he simply inclined his head. This, or death.
In the distance, he heard voices rising.
He watched the destruction of his House from the other side of the Clawrift.
The creature unfolded from the chasm like an oily shadow. It tore the structure from its foundations and dragged it down, smashing and scattering. Demons swooped out of the dark, only to drag agonised figures into it. Fire guzzled through the wreckage.
Matron Baenre stood in the air, high above. Her entire aspect was exultant, and savage. Yvonnel the Eternal—Lolth's most faithful.
After a time, there was no more screaming. The fires would last many hours: so many books, so much paper and parchment. And yet so little time, in the end, to burn all the learning of generations, and his quiet workroom, and his brother’s studious face, and the places where he stood and listened to the House whisper like a living thing.
There was an oath and a contract. It seemed unreal.
“And if I wish to leave?” he asked. The ink still glistened on the parchment.
“Then you may leave,” Jarlaxle said. “You’re not my prisoner.” The parchment was rolled up and stowed in a drawer. “Of course, I wouldn’t advise it—no doubt there are many who’d be very interested to learn that one of you survived the attack.”
“No doubt,” Kimmuriel said. As he looked at Jarlaxle, the galling, impotent rage he felt watching his House brought down was already metamorphosing into something else.
Jarlaxle smiled. “Welcome to Bregan D’aerthe.”
“Kimmuriel—I sent you to the infirmary.”
He was sitting on an outer staircase, looking across the Clawrift. There was a stump where the House had stood; and a strong smell of burning.
“Your people know nothing of psionics. I am not injured. It is temporary.”
“Has this ever happened before?”
“No.”
He felt Jarlaxle study him.
“Come. Let me show you something.” They walked the corridors. A blur of bodies, voices. Jarlaxle opened a door.
“This is my library. You are welcome to it.”
It was vast—as large as any Lolthian chapel Kimmuriel had seen. Shelves upon shelves, some bowed under the weight of volumes.
“You’ll come to see that I reward loyalty,” Jarlaxle said.
Was I your reward, Kimmuriel wondered. For loyalty.
Four days later, his power returned. He was in a meeting with Jarlaxle; he woke on the floor. The room was trembling uncontrollably.
“Welcome back,” Jarlaxle said, leaning over him. “Now that I have all of you, we can begin.”
From childhood he had been taught that emotion was inappropriate. A vestigial trait useless to a psion, who is to other drow as a drow is to a human—superior.
The anger, however, did not diminish. At times it seemed like a relic he had carried from the House: the fury of generations of Oblodrans at the destruction of their legacy. Nothing of them remained; nothing except their rage, rooted more deeply in him than their discipline could dig out.
It coiled through his waking moments. Fantasies of killing Yvonnel, killing every thing that called itself ‘Baenre’. Plans, calculations—impossible.
His restraint was often tested. The company dealt extensively with the first House: reports on rivals, loans of soldiers and scouts, special trade arrangements. Jarlaxle himself was often summoned by the matron or his siblings, at their beck and call for every petty need. It was difficult for Kimmuriel to stomach, serving the stupid Lolthite savages who destroyed his House.
But survival was paramount, and he had learned the lesson of K’yorl’s poor judgement. Nine-tenths of revenge was a waiting game. He could wait.
“Here again?”
Jarlaxle seemed to melt out of the shadows in his library. The silence of his mind made him a phantom. A garish, grinning phantom.
“Scholarship is an ongoing endeavour.”
“You, however, are finite, and must rest sometime. How do you like my collections?”
“You have… many works about the surface.”
That particular archive grew only more laden and eccentric by the day—histories, poetry, ethnographic surveys, pamphlets, instructive works on society and etiquette.
“An idle curiosity of mine.” Jarlaxle ran a finger along the spines, head slightly cocked. “Ah, yes.” He drew out a thick volume. The spine creaked as he opened it. “I should give Graquon back to you.”
“Your interest is far greater than mine, it seems. What did you discover?”
“Hm?”
“From your human.”
“Well—my findings were rather different to Graquon’s, certainly. This one was… unusual. Unusually skilled. Unusually clever. Although captivity also did not agree with him.”
“What did you do with it?”
“With the human?” A shadow passes over Jarlaxle’s face—melancholy, almost. “Oh, I let him go.”
The days passed.
“You saved eight men today.”
Kimmuriel nodded tiredly. His hatred of Baenre did not extend to the Bregan D’aerthe’s soldiers. They, in turn, treated him with guarded respect, if only because they knew he could hear their thoughts.
Jarlaxle leaned against a bookshelf. “I didn’t know you could manipulate time.”
“A localised psychoportation. I moved myself.”
“That explosion wasn’t particularly localised.”
“Relatively, it was.”
“Is this the first time you’ve attempted it?”
“No—but never such a significant alteration.” Exhilarating to corral so much energy at once, and a risk. Izyr was not here to counsel him; he had none of the old notes or treatises. “I am proceeding blindly.”
“What do you need? Write me a list.”
“Those books were never reproduced. And I do not know of any other drow psions alive.”
“The Baenres have an illithid…”
“No.”
Methil, Baenre’s advisor, controlled the Sept of Ill’Ghact, an illithid colony. The Sept tried to destroy his family for years—until they captured one of his cousins. Kimmuriel could surmise Adanar’s fate, and what they would do to him.
“Because of the Sept?” Of course Jarlaxle knew of it. “I wouldn’t allow anything to happen to you.”
The statement caught him off guard; it sounded earnest. “You would not be able to prevent it.”
“Hm. All right.” Strolling around, Jarlaxle perched on the table. “We’ll think of something else.”
Jarlaxle’s guards were not in sight, Kimmuriel realised. They were alone.
Burn him, came the thought. Burn him alive.
It would be quick. Kimmuriel’s skin grew hot with banking energy, and he almost did it.
Then Jarlaxle smiled at him. “Have you read this? It’s fascinating, let me—”
He let Jarlaxle show him, and chatter brightly at him about perceptual constructs of time. The energy drained away.
Later, he sat in his quarters, and put his face in his hands.
The end of Yvonnel Baenre’s reign, when it came, was sudden and ignoble.
He never heard Jarlaxle coming.
Sitting in Jarlaxle’s library, he looked up from a manuscript to find the captain there. The quill stopped scribing, blotting the stroke.
“Don’t get up,” Jarlaxle said. “I get enough bowing and scraping from people who mean it.”
Watching him, Kimmuriel felt the stirrings of unease. Jarlaxle’s eye was tense and overbright, his mouth not quite smiling. Kimmuriel knew volatile energy when he saw it.
Jarlaxle said, “What are you working on?”
“It is complex.” Above the inkblot, line after line of mathematical notation.
“I enjoy complexity. Explain it to me.”
“Very well.” This was familiar, indulging Jarlaxle. “The process of transforming an object into the duplicate of another object—including magical properties—is a form of entanglement with a high failure rate. This is the formula…”
Jarlaxle knew both arcana and mathematics—a Baenre education, or self-taught. He grasped the concepts readily as Kimmuriel laid them out.
“Some objects are permanently transformed. Others gradually revert to what they were.”
“As if the object—the substance—recalls what it was,” Jarlaxle said.
“That is an adequate analogy, yes.”
“How interesting. Just as in life. In fact, on that subject—”
Jarlaxle dug in his pocket for something and held it out. It was Kimmuriel's psicrystal—badly cracked, right through the core.
“I had this retrieved,” Jarlaxle said. “I suspect it’s beyond repair—but I thought you might wish to keep it all the same.”
Kimmuriel felt the corner of his mouth pull up, unpleasantly. “For sentimental reasons.”
“For whatever reasons you may have. I don’t expect my men to forget where they came from.”
“I have not.”
“I know.”
Kimmuriel took the psicrystal and sent a tendril of enquiry through it. There were no murmurs, or glassy images of the long past—it was dead and empty. Candlelight caught on the broken edges.
A hot feeling built under his breastbone. It filled him up. In front of him the table shook, and he throttled his power to keep it under control.
He watched Jarlaxle wander toward the bookshelf. The psicrystal cut into his palm.
“News from the warfront,” Jarlaxle said, in a low, idle voice. “Yvonnel Baenre is dead.”
It was scarcely believable. The city’s monarch, Lolth’s most favoured, the woman who ordered his House ripped up from its foundations and smashed in the abyss— “Dead?”
“Oh, yes. The scout was quite certain. Dead as dead can be. Killed by a dwarf, of all things.” Jarlaxle looked as if he might laugh.
Kimmuriel was on his feet, but did not remember rising. He felt not one thing but many. It was like rage, or excitement, or fear, as if his heart were shaking.
Jarlaxle seemed unsurprised by his reaction. “I think a drink is in order, don’t you?”
“You consider it worth celebrating?”
“Of course. She was a dreadful tyrant, and a tedious fanatic.” He could hear hatred in Jarlaxle’s voice.
“You have served her for years.”
“We all served her. That is the nature of a tyrant.”
With a violent flourish, Jarlaxle produced a bottle of wine, then two glasses. Uncorked, the wine ran out red—surface wine. He handed a glass to Kimmuriel and raised the other. “The supreme ruler is dead. Long may she rot.”
They drank. The wine tasted as red as it looked—bitter after sweet.
Kimmuriel lowered his glass. Taking Jarlaxle in, as if seeing him for the first time. Another son of another tyrant who overreached herself. Another survivor; another exception to a barbaric rule.
He said, “I know who you are.”
“That is a relief,” Jarlaxle said, with forced joviality. “You’ve been with us long enough, I should hope—”
“Your family name.”
Jarlaxle stilled. Then he said, soft, “And how would you know that?”
“K’yorl was very pleased with it. With deceiving Matron Baenre, the night you were born.”
Slowly, Jarlaxle drew in breath. His shoulders rose—he was clasping his hands behind his back very tightly.
“Indeed,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”
“I was led to believe that I was… one of her chosen. Meant to do her bidding, and so forth.”
Jarlaxle had sat down, and was resting his cheek in his hand. Kimmuriel could almost feel the deliberations of that remarkable mind.
“If you were,” Kimmuriel said, “would Lolth not have used her own power to spare you? Rather than that of someone who despised her, like K’yorl?”
“She loves ironies.”
“Perhaps. She allowed your House to go on believing it.”
“Yes,” Jarlaxle said. “And K’yorl kept the secret too—within your House, at least.”
“K’yorl had that much discretion. But she was proud of her work.”
“She should have been. It was a marvellous trick to play on them. A mockery of their mindless fanaticism, their brutal rituals, their scraping before a goddess who would destroy them all for an afternoon’s amusement.”
“You hate them.”
“Frankly, we’d all be better off if Lolth hurled them into the Clawrift.”
“Yes,” Kimmuriel said. His own voice surprised him, how vehement it was.
At that, Jarlaxle smiled. “Ah,” he said, “and then there’s you. You’ve known for quite some time, haven’t you? Since before we met?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve spent these last months despising me.” Jarlaxle studied his face with utmost attention. “Because you believe I conspired with them to bring down your House. And bargained for your life in the process—is that about the gist of it?”
“You deny it.”
“I do, though I understand why you might arrive at such a conclusion. I did come out of it well—but it was entirely unbeknownst to them.” Jarlaxle poured more wine into their glasses. “Obviously, your House was a useful check on Baenre’s power—more useful than even I knew, it seems. But, for that very reason, Yvonnel was emphatic none of you should survive. No exceptions.”
“And you followed that edict to the letter.”
“Why should I? What a waste that would have been. So many perish because of the squabbles of matron mothers—and it’s that much more egregious when it’s someone so young, and of such rare intelligence and talent.”
“I see.”
“You hid it well,” Jarlaxle says. “But then, you are very good at hiding—I knew that when I met you. You can become whatever’s required of you.”
“If I had not, I would be dead.”
“My friend, it isn’t a criticism. I would never blame you for surviving, or the means thereof. For one thing, I can’t employ corpses.” He lifted his glass. “Drink your wine. We are celebrating.”
Kimmuriel found his glass empty again, and Jarlaxle refilled it, then leaned back in his chair.
“It seems that, quite unintentionally, your family did me the greatest possible favour.”
“It was no favour. It was spite.”
“Why do we exist, my friend, if not out of spite? Your mother’s spite saved my life. My mother’s spite killed your family. Now they’re both dead, and we survive in spite of them. We who Lolth disdains—the lowly, the unwanted, the doomed.”
“You are none of those things.”
“No,” Jarlaxle said. “Not anymore.”
Kimmuriel’s cheeks were numbing. His head felt warm and strange. He held out his hand and manipulated his fingers; and for a moment his power quivered, and he lost his grip on it. It surged up—books leapt off the table, thudding down beside Jarlaxle.
Jarlaxle had drugged him. He tried to understand the betrayal. “What have you done?”
“I haven’t.” Jarlaxle seemed truly puzzled. Then his face resolved into understanding. “You’ve never had alcohol before.”
“No.” In the pursuit of self-knowledge he had consumed almost every psychoactive substance known to the drow. But his matron deemed alcohol useless; it only induced dullness and stupidity. Now he understood her position. “This is usual?”
Jarlaxle laughed. “My dear Kimmuriel, you’re drunk. Admittedly, the book hurling is a first, I’ve not seen that before—but otherwise, yes, this is the typical result of imbibing more than one’s normal quantity.”
“I see,” Kimmuriel said. “I will… endeavour not to throw objects in your direction.”
“I won’t take it as a personal slight,” Jarlaxle said. “You have to control it at all times?”
“It would be dangerous if I did not.”
“That sounds rather wearisome.”
“I was trained for it.”
“Yes, I know how Oblodrans trained their children. Although ‘train’ implies a useful end to all of the… brutality.”
“It was necessary.”
“Come now. Your family aren’t here, you needn’t go on claiming—”
“A child with significant psionic talent and no discipline is like a cellar full of smokepowder. I was dangerous to myself and others.”
“Could your family not dodge a few flying objects?”
“It is much more than that,” Kimmuriel said. He felt flushed, his blood hectic.
“Oh?”
“If you removed that eyepatch, I could make you slit your own throat. I could arrest your breathing, strike you blind, paralyse every muscle in your body. I could erase all memory of this conversation, or all the conversations we have ever had. I could make you believe all your men were plotting against you—that your mother were alive again and stood in front of you. Anything I wished. And I have had those capabilities since I was eight years old.”
Jarlaxle simply looked at him. “You know, I think that’s the most you’ve ever said to me at once.”
“Jarlaxle.”
“Yes, yes, I take the point.”
“A child with that much power, exerting it on a whim…”
“Exceptional children require particular handling, we’re in agreement there. I think we disagree on what the nature of that should be.”
“You recognise, at least, that discipline is vital.”
“But I don’t imagine it would kill you—or me—if you relaxed a little. Do you like the feeling?”
Kimmuriel blinked. Even that felt sluggish. “I do not know.”
“It will wear off—you haven’t had a great deal.”
Disorientated, Kimmuriel let his head sink, breathing deeply. The soft ropey weight of his braid fell forward.
He felt Jarlaxle touch it. “You have your mother’s hair,” Jarlaxle said. “Her only good quality, in my opinion.” A slight pull, as the length ran through Jarlaxle’s fist. “Beautiful.”
He glanced up. He recognised the look on Jarlaxle’s face, but he could not place it. With Jarlaxle he was forced to attend to the slightest expression or gesture, and nothing was conclusive.
“This isn’t quite the Oblodran style, is it. I recall it was tighter.”
“Excessively so,” Kimmuriel said. His scalp would ache during formal occasions.
Jarlaxle’s fingertips brushed down his neck. He breathed in.
“You’re not used to touch.”
“No,” Kimmuriel said.
The touch was light, yet his skin seemed to sensitise to it, like iron taking on an electric charge. “Do you dislike it?”
“No.”
He was rooted in place, looking into Jarlaxle’s eye, which was calm and considering—and possessive. “Do you intend to bed me?”
Jarlaxle's mouth curved up. “Would you like me to bed you?”
“I already work for you,” Kimmuriel said. “I do not know what you would gain by it.”
A laugh. “Why, pleasure, of course. You’ve never had sex, have you?”
“No.”
“Lack of desire, or opportunity?”
“Both.”
“Are you not curious?”
“It is all your people think about, so I am familiar—overly familiar—with the subject matter.”
“I’m sure you are.” Jarlaxle was still touching his braid. “But that isn’t at all the same as experiencing it for yourself.”
“It is merely flesh,” Kimmuriel said. “I do not trouble myself with it.”
“Trouble yourself,” Jarlaxle echoed, humour in his voice. “Well, without descending into a discussion of metaphysics—the body can’t be readily separated from the mind, as I’m sure you know. They are… entangled, to borrow that concept, and the nature of that entanglement is complicated, and endlessly fascinating.”
“If my mind were ordinary, perhaps.”
“In this, my friend, you’re no exception.”
“Why is it such a source of interest to you?”
“Sex? I enjoy it.”
Kimmuriel shook his head, pulling a little against Jarlaxle’s hold. “Pleasure is ephemeral. It has no currency nor future value. There is nothing to learn from it, nothing to gain.”
“I find value in things that are ephemeral,” Jarlaxle said. Seeing Kimmuriel’s skepticism, he grinned. “You know, you and I aren’t dissimilar. We’re both driven by curiosity. And a person may reveal by touch things they’d never confess aloud. Secret things, hidden things—things they’re not even conscious of, things they’d deny to their last. It’s riveting.”
“Is that what you wish from me? Hidden things?”
“Hardly.” Another slow stroke. “You’re too good at hiding.”
Jarlaxle’s face was poised, the visible eye very dark, his mouth seeming both sensual and ruthless. A creature beyond Kimmuriel’s understanding.
He felt the blood move in his neck. The hand on his hair did not have the weight of a command. Worse, almost, to be given the choice.
“I will retire,” he said, quietly. “It is late.”
The smile did not diminish; it grew wide. Jarlaxle removed his hand. “As you will.”
With a calm he did not feel, Kimmuriel began to leave.
“Kimmuriel.”
He turned in the doorway. “Yes.”
Jarlaxle tipped up the last of his wine, throat moving. His body was leisurely arranged. “If you betray me, I’ll finish what she began—and take pleasure in it.”
Kimmuriel nodded. “I know.”
After that, the nature of their association changed.
Jarlaxle seemed—relieved. Clearly the spectre of Lolth’s favour had hung over him for many years; but now he knew the circumstances of his birth, and could discuss them frankly. Beyond those discussions, Kimmuriel was forbidden to speak of it. Jarlaxle did not want anyone to know where he came from—what he was.
A few days later, Kimmuriel was made a lieutenant. He was pleased with his new quarters, which had a workroom and a library. His wages paid for rare books, good ink, high-grade crystals, exotic specimens and substances; and he could devote more time to experimentation. He and Jarlaxle often spoke into the night—about strategy, new ventures, people they might try to acquire; and his own research, which always seemed to interest Jarlaxle, even the most esoteric subject matter.
Jarlaxle, however, was restless. He had begun pitting his siblings against each other, contorting their plans, betraying their secrets. A high-stakes game, in the void left by Yvonnel’s death. And yet the object of his attention seemed not to be Menzoberranzan at all. Boredom was driving him in other, more extreme directions.
“My brother likes to imagine a time after the matriarchy has been toppled.” Narbondel was dimming. Below Jarlaxle’s balcony the Clawrift fell away in blackness, infinite. “With him at the top, no doubt.”
“What do you imagine?”
“Something different,” Jarlaxle said, savagely. “Very different.”
“We will be overcommitted.”
“It’s a complex operation,” Jarlaxle said, “and seizing the guildhouse quickly is crucial—”
“Our people are at severe disadvantage on the surface,” Kimmuriel replied. “Kobolds are a wiser choice.”
“Kobolds are incapable of being discreet. It must be drow.”
“Then I can only state, again, my opposition to this course of action.”
Would this always be his role? To object to Jarlaxle’s plans, as they became wilder and riskier?
Jarlaxle’s expression did not ease. He said to the others, “Leave us, please.”
Dutifully they went out. Kimmuriel sensed Rai’gy giving him a significant look, but he kept his attention upon Jarlaxle. He heard the doors close.
Jarlaxle was not a sadist. Any punishment would, at least, be proportionate and matter-of-fact.
“If there is a choice,” he said, “I would prefer it were not public.”
“Public?” Jarlaxle said. “What is it you believe I’m going to do?”
“Some form of discipline, I assume.”
“No, no.” Jarlaxle sat on the edge of the table and smoothed the map with a sweep of his hand. “I don’t punish my men for disagreeing with me. In this instance, I simply thought it best to have you air your objections in private.”
“While letting them believe you are reprimanding me.”
“Well, I can’t be seen to favour you too much—even if you are the cleverest of them.” There was admiration in Jarlaxle’s voice. He felt himself respond to it, though he knew it was calculated.
“I do not believe there is any danger of that,” he replied. “As I spend most of my time disagreeing with you.”
“I’m glad of it. I don’t want lieutenants who simply reflect my own ideas back to me, and flatter me at every turn. If I did, I’d install mirrors in here instead. I hope you’ll continue to speak freely if you have misgivings.”
“You will not always wish it.” It was not an accusation; it was simply inevitable.
“And that will be your burden, my friend, to tell me things I wish not to hear. If there comes a time when I refuse to listen to criticism, that is when I will most have need of it. Yes?”
“Yes,” Kimmuriel said, and the look between them sealed it.
“Good! All right, if we were to use kobolds—”
“There was no time for formal introductions earlier,” Jarlaxle said, “but let us rectify that now. Artemis, this is Kimmuriel Oblodra, a very unusual drow.” Jarlaxle was speaking Common, which Kimmuriel understood only piecemeal. “Kimmuriel is a psion.”
“Greetings,” Kimmuriel said.
“Kimmuriel, this is Artemis Entreri, a very unusual human.”
A human recently salvaged from a fire, bruised and singed. Entreri resembled other humans native to this region, except there was something anomalous about his eyes.
Kimmuriel said, in Drow, “We are to be fronted by this?”
“Have you many other suitable humans in waiting?” It was the human that replied—in Drow. Kimmuriel glared at Jarlaxle, who smiled.
“I have realised,” Jarlaxle said, “that Graquon’s understanding was limited.”
This was the human Jarlaxle kept in Menzoberranzan. His experiment.
“Come,” Jarlaxle said to Entreri. “There’s much to discuss.”
And to him, absently: “Kimmuriel.”
“Goodnight!”
“Goodnight.”
Kimmuriel is scrying—it draws his attention, a mind nearby. It is Entreri, walking away from Jarlaxle’s rooms.
Just before Jarlaxle closes the door, Kimmuriel sees his expression.
If proof is needed that Jarlaxle is going soft on these creatures, it is there in his face.
Something must be done.
Chapter Text
“Entreri?”
Dwahvel blinks at him from the doorway. Halfling guards crowd behind her, unnerved. “Did you—use a door?”
In the tavern’s backroom, there’s only a foot of space between his head and the vaulted stone ceiling. A shaft of light slopes toward them from a high arched window. The flagstones are uneven, and radiate coolness.
He's stood in this room many times since he returned to Calimport. It isn't the absence of drow, the walls impervious to divination, or the fine alcohol—or perhaps it's all of those, but most particularly the sense of calm and constancy.
Dwahvel's business isn't conquest; it's cooperation. She strives to give people what they want, to be indispensable. At your service but not at your whim, that was the first thing she said to him, and it's proven true. In his case, she doesn't offer secrets or thievery—only conversation. Basadoni would be disappointed, no doubt, that his finest protégé should wish for something so mundane as a quiet room and someone who doesn't look at him as though he's a drawn sword.
“Your doors are trapped.”
Dwahvel scrapes her curls back from her face. “So are the windows, and all other means of entry,” she says. “Except the front door, strangely enough. What’ll you drink?”
“Coffee.”
Waving off her guards, she points him to the padded couch against the far wall. Then she drags a wooden chair across the rug by the arm and sets it opposite him.
Two small cups of coffee are served on the table between them. He takes the cup nearer to her. They enjoy each other’s company, but she’s not entirely above poisoning him, for the right coin.
She grins and takes the other cup. It’s a clever face, with inquisitive brown eyes, and freckles a shade browner than her cheeks.
“You look tired,” he says.
She snorts. “So do you. You know, something I used to hear—when people spoke of you in the past tense—was that your manners were impeccable, despite your profession. I’m beginning to doubt that’s the case.” She stirs a lump of sugar neatly into her coffee. “Yes, the entire sabban’s[1] whipping itself into a frenzy, and keeping things in order is taking up too much of my time. If you’re going to start a war, would you wait until after the solstice? I’d like not to deprive my people of the festivities.”
“I’m not starting a war.”
“Like hell you’re not,” she says, then seems to reassess the wisdom of speaking so bluntly to him. He gives a low laugh.
The quiet expands: taut, but not unpleasant.
Dwahvel laces her fingers around her knee. “An interesting rumour landed on my desk this morning,” she says. “About a corpse.”
“Hardly unusual.”
“Oh, there’s been no end of them since you came back. This one, though, was being secreted out of your guild in the middle of the night.”
He drinks his coffee in two long sips. It’s good. “Assassination attempt.”
“On you, I’d wager. And that was your would-be killer being disappeared.”
“An incidental victim. I haven’t identified who was behind it.”
Dwahvel is scrutinising him. “No blood on the body, no visible wounds—must've been an unusual method.”
“Arsenic.” When she mutters a curse, he adds, “It wasn’t a credible attempt.”
“A bit obvious, too. Was it the Rakers?”
She rarely asks him a direct question; he rarely answers. “Perhaps. I’ll know soon.”
“Do you have any of it?”
“Some.” He takes out the vial and passes it to her.
“Wine,” she observes, holding it up. “Odd choice. I’ll have my people look at it.”
“Have them do it quickly.”
“I make no promises.” She’ll have it done in hours, nonetheless.
Dwahvel calls for one of her people, and sends her off with the vial. When they’re alone, she says, “I can’t pretend I’m surprised.”
Entreri's mouth twitches. “What have you heard.”
“Well, no official bounties on your head, now that Basadoni are no longer calling for it. But an extremely valuable head, all the same. Quietly, a lot of people would pay good coin to have you done away with.”
“That was always true.”
“But this is different, isn't it.” She sips her coffee, making him wait. “You were gone a long time—long enough for people to imagine the city without you, or imagine themselves with the kind of sway and reputation you had. Long enough for them to believe you might be slowing down, and that they might replace you, given the right timing and tools.”
“Opportunism is alive and well in Calimport.”
“By putting yourself at the head of the guild, you’ve convinced some of your more reputable competitors to call off the hounds—but you’ve made yourself an even more attractive target to the rest. And it’s slowly dawning on them—on all of them—how difficult you could be.”
He allows himself a slight smile. “I’d hate to disappoint them.”
“Then be wary,” she says, seriously. “And tell me when you know more.”
He’s offered her no coin, no barter, nothing more than favours he knows she won’t call in. The thought warms him, unexpectedly.
It’s strange to sit in Basadoni’s study on the other side of the desk. A part of him expects to hear Basadoni remark, “Amusing, lieutenant.” Stacks of parchment surround him—guard rotations, inventories, expenses, reports, lengthy sycophantic letters. Burdens of his new position.
“Master?”
Siyen’s voice comes through the door. Entreri leans back in the chair, flexing his fingers and kneading his palm. He’s been writing for hours.
“What is it.”
“Hand for you, master.”
Entreri straightens. “Send him in.”
The door opens.
Hand was spymaster when Entreri joined, decades past. His hair is still black and thick as grass, but his face is deeply lined and his muscles have gone to sinew. He survived the coup by cunning and serendipity—he remained in the background, rather than clash with Entreri directly. Now he serves as one of Entreri’s lieutenants, though he inhabits the role no more than Jarlaxle does. Entreri has heard the rumours, that Hand is working against him.
“Entreri.”
Straight away, he knows. Hand is stiff-shouldered, cagey: ready for a confrontation.
“Come in,” Entreri says.
Hand closes the door to Basadoni’s—to his study. Entreri hasn’t invited him to sit, but he scrapes back one of the chairs in front of the desk and settles in it.
Entreri says, “No doubt you’ve heard that one of the servants has been killed.”
“I heard.” Hand’s voice is throaty, scraped—tobacco habit. “Poison, was it?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“I’m sure you already know.”
“Arsenic.”
Entreri rests his forearms on the desk. “And what does that tell you.”
“Maybe something useful,” Hand says, “or nothing. It’s an interesting choice, for sure.”
“An assassination attempt against the head of the guild, on your watch.”
“It failed.”
“Through no intervention of yours,” Entreri says. “What use do you have, if not that.”
He takes vindictive pleasure in how Hand stiffens. “I am not—”
He doesn’t wait for the rest. “Are you aware of an order among the Rakers to kill me.”
“No, not that I—”
“Are you aware of someone within the guild conspiring with the Rakers.”
“No.”
“Whose interests do you serve.”
“I serve the guild.”
“But you work against me.”
The denial doesn’t come. A brief clench of teeth, and Hand says, “You sold us out to drow.”
“Sold you out,” Entreri says, temper stirring. “This is a thieves’ guild. Don’t pretend at honour you don’t have.”
Like Entreri, Hand is watching the sand in the clock run down, helpless to stop it. He might be uninvolved in the arsenic plot; it hardly matters. He’s disloyal, which Entreri can’t afford.
“Not honour,” Hand says. “Debts.”
“And what debts do you think I have.”
Hand smears his palm across his mouth, then slaps it down on the desk. “You know, I thought that was the one thing you’d never do—move against Basadoni. The man raised you—he made you. Not many remember, but I do. You were a skinny, filthy, illiterate whelp he found in the gutter, fighting off other paupers with stones. He could’ve had you executed, but instead he made you a lieutenant.”
In an instant, Entreri’s chest feels white-hot, as if his lungs have swollen and inflamed. “He gave me that position because I killed six of his best men, outwitted and removed a lieutenant, eluded his entire spy network for a tenday, and didn’t cower at his displeasure like the rest of you.”
“And see how you repaid him.”
“Spare me—you were no loyalist. You and Sharlotta, and Kadran, using him as a puppet for years.”
“To keep the guild from collapsing—”
“Or to keep it strategically divided, for your profit. Basadoni knew about that—he kept note of it.” Outrage makes Hand’s expression taut, but he has the sense—finally—to keep his mouth shut.
Entreri takes a page of the cipher from the drawer and places it in front of him. “Whose writing is this.” Hand has been reading reports for decades; he’ll know it.
Hand shrugs, jerkily. “It’s gibberish.”
“You and I both know it isn’t. But I’m not asking about the content. Tell me who wrote this.”
“Why?”
“I’m curious,” Entreri says, “whether you wish to keep your head or not.”
Hand stares at the parchment, but doesn’t speak.
Entreri waits—and waits. Then he leans forward. “Do you imagine I’m feeling indulgent? I’m not. Last chance.”
“Amiral,” Hand barks. “Amiral—looks like his hand.”
Vicente Amiral: commander of the guild’s soldiers.
“Would you stake your life on that.”
A ripple passes over Hand’s face—helpless, furious. “Yes.”
Entreri nods. He was aware of Vicente’s animosity toward him, but he assumed the man was more pragmatic. Evidently Basadoni’s death is drawing all the rats out of the walls.
He rises, and draws his dagger. Hand’s face goes rigid.
“Don’t,” Hand begins, voice rising, hand fumbling for a weapon, “don’t—you’ll regret it—”
Entreri steps around the desk, cutting off his exit. “My enemies make you look like a child. I assure you, it won’t even register.”
It is evening. The task is proving more difficult than expected: scrying without a target is not unlike listening for a very particular frequency of sound in a tunnel full of echoes.
Kimmuriel finds most of the guild gathered for a meal: the same long tables are refracted in dozens of minds, thronging with foreign things. The same hardscrabble brown faces, hands amid the platters, chewing mouths. They are tired, discontent, restless, hungry; they bleat interminably about wages, the heat, their leaders, and all manner of useless trivia.
He skims over two guards having sex in a storeroom. Soldiers throw dice in a dormitory for coins, drunk on mead. Young thieves gossip on an outside wall. A patrol files into the barracks, grumbling about street traffic. Ordinary, unremarkable.
Another fruitless effort. Kimmuriel begins to withdraw, thinking of hot tea and the book on ceremorphosis.
He veers into a thought of Entreri, and a welter of hatred.
On a raised table in the mess hall, a man is bent over his bowl. His unease and fear churn like water. Neither are so noisy or compulsive as his rage.
—murdered him—murdered him—fucking cold dead evil—
Many in the guild hate Entreri, but few despise him with such specificity and force. This is the first lead to present itself; Kimmuriel reaches for the man’s mind, slithering over it until he finds an opening to slip in, quietly, slowly.
—didn’t work—doesn’t matter—be patient still time doesn’t matter inevitable—
He waits, feeling for agitation. The human does not detect him. He pushes deeper in.
Brown paper; white powder. Need more—dead—not soon enough—show him and show all of them—
Kimmuriel follows the man as he leaves the table. He trails him to his quarters in the barracks. He lingers as he undresses for bed. The ravings are difficult to sort, but he can determine that it is not merely hatred. It is fixation, and this human—Vicente—has already acted upon it: the arsenic, the wine. This is Entreri’s would-be assassin.
A pitiful creature, Kimmuriel reflects, as he extricates himself. It is little wonder Entreri involved himself with drow, if this is all the challenge his own kind can offer.
No matter how many times he uses the dagger, he’ll never be used to the remnants of a man's soul simmering in his body. It feels like having swallowed sunlight.
Entreri finds Kimmuriel in the pasha's library. It seems he's expected: Kimmuriel is staring at the doorway when he steps through, and with more than the cool, remote distaste of previous days. Entreri tries to keep his thoughts quiet and flat.
In Drow, Kimmuriel says, “Tell me what you have learned.”
“Vicente Amiral arranged the attempt. Presumably he resents me for killing his father.”
“His father,” Kimmuriel says—then, “Basadoni.”
“Basadoni never formally acknowledged him. He’s a bastard.”
“Do humans have a particular regard for who sired them?”
“Vicente does.” The resentment is more complicated; Kimmuriel needn't know that.
Kimmuriel accepts this with a look of derision, but says, “So you are not wholly useless. Imagine my surprise.” He folds his hands. “Indeed, he is obtaining more arsenic. He is quite intent on killing you.”
“Then we should put a stop to it, obviously.”
Kimmuriel tilts his head, as if regarding a peculiar animal. “There is no we. I have no further need of you.”
“Too bad,” Entreri says. “This is my guild, you may recall. I’ll deal with Vicente.”
“I have been charged by Jarlaxle to—”
“Then you’ll have to continue to cooperate, won’t you.”
Kimmuriel blinks—and Entreri feels that rise in pressure, his skin creeping. “You intend to confront him?”
“He hasn't fled the guild; he believes he got away with it. Whether he acted of his own accord, or had a sponsor—I will find out which.”
“And if he does not wish to give up that information?”
“That’s where you might be useful, I suppose.”
“Useful.” Kimmuriel’s tone is caustic.
“Depending on whether you can obey instructions or not,” Entreri says.
It's reckless—an effect of the raw surging life he’s just absorbed, or the last threads of his patience straining. Kimmuriel could do terrible things to him, easily.
“Watch your tongue,” Kimmuriel says, “or I will pull it out of you.” His eyes glow luminous and hateful in his face; and all the while energy is pouring off him like off the sea. Entreri’s blood surges at the threat.
Charming.
Entreri turns his head sharply; Kimmuriel starts.
Another trick: it's Jarlaxle's voice, but Jarlaxle is nowhere in sight.
If you've finished posturing, Jarlaxle says, I'll borrow Entreri from you.
“Tomorrow,” Entreri tells Kimmuriel. Then, to Jarlaxle, “Where are you.”
In the tower. Come and find me.
As he leaves, he glances over his shoulder. The look in Kimmuriel's eyes is bitter and a promise—of what, he can't tell.
“Artemis.”
The stair spirals up to the vast domed hall at the top of the Basadoni tower. It’s empty—Jarlaxle’s voice echoes, massive and hollow.
Entreri remembers the sticky summer evenings when Basadoni would entertain hundreds in this hall. Pashas, sabbalads, druzirs[2], captains of the amlakkar, magisters from the Guild Arcane, aristocrats, famous artisans, goateed urban literati—all come to pay homage to the master of Calimport’s underworld. Woozy perfumes of saffron and ambergris, coiling lyra music played by courtesans, anise wine poured by servants wearing white, the bubbling of conversations in Alzhedo and Common. Entreri had been with the guild only months when he was first required to attend one such occasion, as Basadoni’s bodyguard. It amused the old man to bring a street child into such company: he remembers feeling groomed and stiff in formal clothes, the thickness of paint on his lips and a jewelled knife on his belt.
Dominion is a coin with two sides, Basadoni said to him, as a sabbalad bowed deeply and retreated from them. One side is force; the other is diplomacy. Be careful never to rely too much on one at the expense of the other.
Entreri almost expects to see the old man there, neat and contained. Instead he sees Jarlaxle.
Jarlaxle leans against the balcony wall, forearms dark on the white stone. Taking in the gardens like a caleph[3] surveying his kingdom. “What a pleasant night.” Glancing back at Entreri, he smiles. “Join me, why don’t you?”
Things between them have been tentative since the incident with the shard. All the same, Entreri wants to see an ally, not the man holding the key to his prison. Again, he allows himself to be lured.
The air is warm with the remains of the day, dusty and fragrant. He can smell the sunbaked stone. Nightjars are churring in the trees around them. The sky looks low, encrusted with stars.
Jarlaxle breathes out. “Quiet, isn’t it?”
Entreri lets the lights blur a little before his eyes. “They're on edge. Slum-dwellers have a healthy fear of wars between guilds—it usually ends with scores of them dead in gutters. Some variation from dying of plague or cholera in their hovels, presumably.”
“You don’t have much esteem for them. The common people.”
“Do you have great esteem for the drow in the Braeryn? I doubt it.”
“On the contrary—some of my dearest friends have been commoners.”
“I assume they weren’t the ones the nobles hunted for sport.” He witnessed one of those ‘hunts’, a gang of noble drow on lizardback whooping as they burned slumhouses.
“Do you know, I never asked.”
In the pleasure garden below, one of Basadoni’s peacocks raises a high, wavering cry like an infant’s. When it subsides, Entreri says:
“Most of the people in this city are poor and uneducated. They live short, desperate lives. There’s nothing to admire.”
He remembers the shock of all this opulence, after years of dusty, dirty streets and sleeping in tumbledown buildings. The gardens, the bath-house, the archways and courtyards and green-glazed mosaic floors, the tower with its shining dome. The sense of being enveloped by such wealth, like a soft, suffocating cage.
Jarlaxle tips his head down, as if looking for the sound. “You were one of them, weren’t you.”
Entreri brushes dust off his sleeve, to cover the sick weight that has dropped into his stomach. “Was I.”
“Food was scarce, I imagine. You’re small for a human.”
“Average for this region.”
“Not quite.”
“If you say so.”
Jarlaxle didn’t probe him like this in Menzoberranzan. The interest went only as deep as finding new ways to test or humiliate him; back him into a corner, get a reaction. This curiosity seems genuine, as though Jarlaxle considers them equals. But Jarlaxle’s manner when sifting through the matter of his life is still coy and half-mocking.
“You began in poverty,” Jarlaxle goes on, “but someone saw fit to take you away from it.”
“Did you ask me here to engage in pointless speculation,” Entreri says, quietly.
Jarlaxle doesn’t notice the tone of warning, or doesn’t care. “It was Basadoni. Who made you what you are.”
Entreri clenches his jaw at the echo of his encounter with Hand. He doesn’t want Jarlaxle prying into his relationship with Basadoni. To an outsider it would seem strange and cold, even pitiable. Basadoni learned things about him no one else knew. That was, in part, why he killed him.
“I taught myself.”
“Oh, I’m sure you taught yourself a great deal.” Jarlaxle leans on his elbow. It’s difficult to avoid his gaze. “But not all of it. You’re too polished, your skills are too diverse.”
Entreri looks past him, across the gardens. The date palm fronds sway and shuffle.
“Yes,” Jarlaxle goes on. “He had you from quite a young age. Two decades ago you were already making a name for yourself, so—”
“Or I took someone else’s name.”
“No, no.” Jarlaxle smiles. “You’ve fought for everything you’ve ever had.” His voice is airy. “It wouldn’t even occur to you to steal someone else’s glory.”
Entreri’s insides are a moil of aversion and thrill, as if he’s staring down dangerous magic. He has threatened people with extreme violence for presuming to guess about his childhood, his early life; about Basadoni. He can’t threaten Jarlaxle with anything. He can’t even guess how much Jarlaxle knows about him, and what’s left to conceal.
He forces his jaw to relax. “If that’s the best you can do,” he says, “tell your spies to make more of an effort.”
Jarlaxle gives a low laugh. “My spies? Hardly. Those things you told me yourself.”
Again that hot gnawing, like shame. And yet, having gained the advantage, Jarlaxle doesn’t press it. The look he gives Entreri is knowing and amused. “Come—walk with me in the garden.”
Entreri follows him. Follows him across the wide empty hall and down the stair. Follows him through the corridors to the blue door lit by a single torch which leads outside.
“After you,” Jarlaxle says, and ushers him through with a touch to his arm. It’s only brief, but suddenly there’s heat in that arm, and in his chest. “Beautiful, hm?”
The garden is dark and full of the burring of insects. The date palms creak as the wind moves them. He can smell the orange trees; and the roses, like sugar and orange rind. It slings him backward in time—walking this path to report to Basadoni; the flash of the pruning blade, and the browned, wilting roseheads in Basadoni’s hand.
He watches Jarlaxle conjure a light, then wander toward one of the roses growing against the wall.
“What is this?”
“It’s a rose.” Cupped gently in Jarlaxle’s hand, dark plum red.
“So this is what they look like!” Jarlaxle says, with enthusiasm. “Yes, I’ve read about them… but the illustrations looked rather different. Artistic license, I suppose?”
“Maybe not,” Entreri says. “Those are antique roses, imported from Sembia.”
“Oh? That seems a great deal of trouble for flowers.”
“Basadoni insisted on them. He once had a gardener whipped to within an inch of his life for planting Chondathan tea roses in error.”
“What’s the difference?”
“This kind only blooms once a year, and only from the old stems. They’re more fragrant—and harder to kill.” Often he’d find the old man standing amid the flowerbeds, restlessly seeking imperfections.
“So he liked rarities, did he?” Jarlaxle says, then makes a show of correcting himself: “Actually, I believe I knew that already.”
The implication isn’t difficult to follow. “I’m not a rarity.”
His veins feel dilated—too much blood. These midsummer nights are seethingly hot.
“No? Is Calimport teeming with humans like you, then? An Entreri on every street, in every alley, deafeating all challengers?”
“I doubt it.”
Jarlaxle’s smile gets wider. The effect is eerie when his eye is glowing. “Rarities, you see.”
“If you say so.”
Reaching, Jarlaxle brushes the tip of his finger against a rose thorn. “They truly are sharp,” he says, wonderingly. If it’s hurting him, he doesn’t show it.
“Did you read about that as well,” Entreri drawls. “Yes, roses have thorns.”
“An interesting paradox. I think I understand why he liked them.” There’s more subtext there, being thrust teasingly at him. Entreri bites his tongue.
Jarlaxle straightens. Tucking his hands behind his back, he twines his fingers together. “If all goes well, it seems we’ll be here a while.”
“Presumably.” They won’t.
“That being the case, I have a request: I’d like you to show me the city.”
Entreri frowns. “You can already see it well enough.” He gestures at the tower behind them.
“No, no, viewing it from a tower balcony is hardly the same. I’d like to see how life is lived down here.”
“Miserably,” Entreri says. “With nothing to be gained from looking at it close up.”
“I beg to differ, my friend.” Jarlaxle sidles toward him, red eye laughing in that clever face. “Come now, it’ll cost you nothing to indulge me.”
Tension is gathering up inside him, but not any usual kind. He’s too aware of Jarlaxle—how close they are, the deepening of Jarlaxle’s voice, as though they’re speaking of something secret.
“If you believe that,” he says, “you’re greatly overestimating my patience.”
“You’re a very patient man,” Jarlaxle says. “I’ve seen it first hand.” At that, something in Entreri’s chest throbs like he's swallowed ice. Patience, Jarlaxle would say, when he had Entreri trapped in Menzoberranzan. Back then, he spoke Common as though it were a great charity. Perhaps some day you’ll see the surface again.
“You can’t simply wander the streets. Not unless you wish to defeat the point of all this secrecy.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning to announce myself. And I’m quite capable of disguise.” Jarlaxle’s eyebrows punctuate his grin.
Entreri looks him up and down—even in the dim there is no mistaking the great lurid hat, the many-coloured cloak, the glitter of jewels at his ears, fingers and neck. “I don’t think there exists an illusion that strong.”
Jarlaxle laughs, a deep full sound. “I'll call on you soon,” he says. “I have great plans for the place—”
“What place.”
“Why, Calimport, of course. And perhaps the entire region, before too long.”
Another cold throb. Nothing good will come of Jarlaxle talking like a conqueror.
Jarlaxle doesn’t notice his disquiet. “Now, go and take your rest—your sleep,” lingering on the word, “and I'll see you first thing in the morning, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Till the morning, then,” Jarlaxle says, and his smile is unfathomable. “Pleasant dreams.”
Kimmuriel’s stride is unsteady as he descends the stair from the pasha’s library to his quarters. It has been four days since his last reverie, and he feels—porous. The guildhouse overflows with clattering, prattling thought.
I will rest, he thinks. I must rest.
On the second floor, he walks into an errant image like a kicked up cloud of hot dust—his own face, full of contempt. It is so angry that he halts, and reaches for it.
Immediately he knows two things: it belongs to the assassin, and it is a dream. It is the first time he has found Entreri unaware.
Sketched out is his workroom, but constructed from shadow and red light. There are forms moving in the background but he can see only himself, his eyes so red they seem to be scorching through his head. He—Entreri—sees him as a dark, gracile nightmare.
A prickle rises along his arms. He did not anticipate that he would affect Jarlaxle’s creature in this fashion.
He steps down onto the landing.
Among Oblodrans it was held that humans are hardly more self-aware than animals. Kimmuriel has observed that Entreri can discern patterns and mimic behaviour—the appearance of cunning, but without depth or substance. Nothing that would separate him from the rest of his cattle-like kind.
When he begins to slip inside Entreri, however, he finds bright strands of thought running in all directions—like complex webbing, but edged and sharp. Impressions crowd at him: voices, dusty streets, a man’s face in rigor mortis, the hard glitter of a red jewel that is somehow laughter, bizarre black script on parchment. The strands coil and fuse, the luminous web spinning itself at great speed. Each way he traces the architecture expands on and on: intricately woven, vibrant with energy.
Entreri is not empty, as Kimmuriel had believed. He is the very opposite. A human with the audacity to be clever; and not merely clever, but intelligent.
Just below the surface, there is a new, crisp memory : Jarlaxle in the dark, voice low and lilting; a hand on his arm, a hot feeling in the body. He creeps toward it, and the entire structure flinches.
Regions surge with brightness around him. Entreri is awake—and aware of him. Kimmuriel pulls back into himself so violently that his vision turns white.
It is possible Entreri will not remember his intrusion. Nevertheless, Kimmuriel descends the rest of the staircase and places tight wards on his rooms.
I see you, he thinks. I know you.
Notes:
1 A district in Calimport. The ruler of a sabban is a sabbalad. [return to text]
2 The ruler of a drudach, a neighbourhood. [return to text]
3 Another word for the syl-pasha, the ruler of Calimshan. [return to text]
Chapter Text
The dirt streets that wind down toward the sea are clear at this hour. None of the ordinary crowds; only a rare carriage, cart, or addled sailor on shore leave. Ships sway in the harbour—low tide. The heat’s already thick, the promise of a sweltering day.
Inside the tavern, Entreri expects an armed welcome. Instead, he finds Dwahvel alone.
She’s sitting on the wooden counter, ankles crossed. Despite the hour, she looks wakeful and put-together, eating a bowl of hot stew.
“Front door,” she says. “I’m honoured.” She sets the bowl down, dabs at her mouth. “Good that you got my message. I always wonder about the reliability of—” She frowns at him. “Tough night?”
“Something like that.”
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“My people identified what was in the wine. I’m curious how you knew it was arsenic.”
“I’m familiar with its effects.”
“Well, you were right on that count, and the other—it's from the Hotenow region. The rest of us are sensible enough to get our lethal poisons from somewhere nearer to home, so the chances it’s the Rakers’ supply are very high, I’d say.”
He folds his arms. “But not certain.”
“That’s charitable,” she says. “Yes, it doesn’t prove they sponsored an attempt on you, but—”
“But,” he prompts her.
“But—everything about you puts them on edge. You’ve been back, oh, six weeks, and in that time you’ve caused the kind of upset usually reserved for plague or the death of the caleph, and now you’re undercutting their trade—”
“I didn’t come back to make them comfortable.”
“No,” a crooked little grin, “no, I’m very aware of that.”
He leans against the counter beside her, letting his eyes drift over coloured liquor bottles and glasses until he arrives at her once more. “It’s Vicente Basadoni.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Stupid boy,” she says. “Grimani always was the brighter one. I met him—Vicente—a few times, back when his father was using him as an emissary to the guilds. Terrible at diplomacy—that mixture of arrogance and self-loathing you find in a certain kind of human man. All the same, you’ll have to proceed carefully.”
“I know.” Vicente is the last of Basadoni’s children, though not in any formal sense.
“What is the Basadoni Guild,” Dwahvel echoes his next thought, “if it isn’t run by the Basadoni family?”
“Something else.”
“Something better, probably. Do you think he’ll try again?”
“Yes,” he says. “It wasn’t a credible attempt, it was absurd theatrics. Poisoning only the wine in the pasha’s chambers—as if I’d drink it without testing it.”
“Arrogant, like I said, and stupid enough to assume you’re the same. The choice is poison is interesting, though. If that was his idea, it’s a cunning one. If not, he’s somebody's dupe with a grudge. Either way—”
He nods; the implication’s clear. “I’ve already removed Hand.”
“Good. From what I’ve heard, he kept himself busy trying to undermine your authority. Mind you, at this rate there won’t be much of your guild left.”
“So be it,” he says. He means to survive this viper pit. Perhaps they won’t survive him.
“I know—” Dwahvel draws her lip between her teeth, and releases it. “I know you have allies you won’t talk about, and you’ll threaten me with death or worse if I try to get any intimations from you about them. So I won’t ask who it is, or what. But I trust it’s under control, whatever it is—because we can’t afford any more chaos.”
He doesn’t reply.
She slides off the bar, boots soundless on the stone. When she turns to face him, she looks as serious as he’s ever seen. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he says.
Vicente Amiral is a man of habit. At six o’clock, while the night patrols are winding down, Vicente will be in the training pits sparring with one of his soldiers.
The guildhouse is placid. Servants murmur in the kitchens, and guards shuffle tiredly as he passes.
Entreri. The voice slices into his thoughts. Your office. I am waiting.
He doesn’t curse or protest; he won’t give Kimmuriel that. Diverting from his course, he climbs the stair.
Kimmuriel is there, in a place the early sun doesn’t reach. His eyes look sunken but he’s otherwise neat and kempt, wearing a robe of very dark plum with faint embroidery along the sleeves. Entreri knows, somehow, that it came from Jarlaxle. Kimmuriel is wearing Jarlaxle’s favour like armour.
He shuts the door.
For a moment, neither of them speaks. He wants to push his fine drow sword between Kimmuriel’s eyes.
The sentence is difficult to form; it sickens him even to say it. “You were in my mind last night.”
Kimmuriel says, quietly, “Was I?”
“Jarlaxle would be interested to hear of it.” And the spectre of Jarlaxle is suddenly between them, like an invisible rope between their wrists.
“You could report it to him,” Kimmuriel says. “But I cannot be held at fault when your mind is gaping open, and so easily caught up in my scrying…”
Entreri’s arms and shoulders pull tight with the effort not to lash out. “You’re disgusting.”
“I am not a beast feigning at being civilised, at least.”
“Nor am I, else you wouldn’t be creeping about in my mind like a thief.”
A muscle slides in Kimmuriel’s jaw. “I have stolen nothing.”
“If you do it again,” Entreri says, “I will kill you.”
There’s a violent silence.
Kimmuriel meets his eyes, seeming to weigh the seriousness of that threat. His breathing's quickened, just a little.
Finally, Entreri opens the door. “Vicente is near the barracks.”
Kimmuriel walks past him. “Very well.”
Entreri considers secrecy, then casts it aside. If half the guild is against him, he’ll demonstrate the penalty for acting upon it.
In Menzoberranzan, he watched Jarlaxle reprimand one of his men for theft. It was public, visible; showy, even. Jarlaxle never laid a hand on his subordinate; the verbal lashing—the humiliation—was enough.
It isn’t Entreri’s way; his instinct has always been for subtlety. Perhaps he learned a few things, among the drow.
“Where’s Amiral.”
He already knows. But the soldier he flags down will tell others that the pasha has descended from his guildhouse to see their commander.
“Down there, pasha.”
In his early years with the guild, Entreri was occasionally ordered to fight men in the training pits. A less rarefied environment than Basadoni’s training hall. He remembers spitting blood into the dust. Bones cracking under his fist. Shouts and roars from all around.
Vicente is sparring with a woman about his height in guild colours. Entreri never knew Basadoni as a younger man, but he must have looked a great deal like Vicente: they have the same deepset eyes, thin nose, hair trimmed to blunt dark edges, though Vicente's eyes are watery and bland where his father's were blackish and quick.
“Commander Amiral.”
Vicente turns—and his swordarm drops.
“Pasha—”
The bow comes too late: Vicente’s opponent beats him to it by seconds, and is already hastening to depart when Vicente jerks back up.
Entreri watches his mark take in the fullness of the danger, and knows: Vicente didn’t expect to be caught. Not so quickly, and not with witnesses.
Arrogant.
He steps down onto the dust floor of the pit. “You don’t seem pleased to see me.”
“I haven’t seen you since—”
“Since I took over the guild.”
As he speaks, he feels something cool touch his mind. Not quite inside, but against—like fingertips, dragging lightly. It’s Kimmuriel.
In the open, he hears, like a murmur in his ear. A curious choice.
Kimmuriel isn’t inside his mind, but is instead demonstrating the futility of that distinction.
Be quiet, he thinks loudly.
“Twenty of my men died that night,” Vicente says, “and it’s as if they never existed. I’m still not permitted to ask about how they died, or why.”
The coup. Jarlaxle’s soldiers are like killing shadows, except that shadows don’t disappear corpses.
“You should forget them,” Entreri says.
“Forget them.” Vicente can’t help but sound scornful, though he tries to hide it. “That’s—much more difficult than the saying of it.”
“No doubt. But you have many more to be concerned with.”
“And they're asking questions. The lack of acknowledgement from you or any of your lieutenants only makes it worse. The pasha would have—”
“What,” Entreri says. “What do you imagine he would have done. Nothing, presumably. I doubt he dealt with anything of his own accord in recent years.”
“He led the guild well.”
“A strange way to describe your own father.”
Vicente sneers. “My father.”
“You’re his only living child.”
“He had little enough time for me.”
“He made you the captain of his soldiers.”
“Reluctantly.”
“But that wasn’t enough.” He doesn’t know what more a man could wish from his father. Basadoni didn’t drink excessively. Didn’t use grevious physical punishment. Didn’t have deviant tastes.
How does a human so crippled by sentiment come to be given command?
Entreri realises, with a jolt, that Kimmuriel has settled on the steps nearby. There are soldiers milling about at the mouth of the pit, but only Entreri can see the drow sitting in plain view—incongruous, his hair like ivory in the early light.
“He was a busy man,” Vicente is saying, sourly. “Guild matters took up all his time. And what time he did have…” Entreri watches him try to tuck back behind his tongue whatever words would spill out.
They’re almost the same age: when he joined the guild, Vicente was sixteen to his fourteen. A moderately decent swordsman, but entirely lacking in discipline—too much time whoring and gambling. For that reason, Basadoni declined to formally adopt him at eighteen, and so began Vicente’s decline into dissolute bitterness.
Entreri says, “Go on.”
“What time he did have, he spent with his pupils—”
“He trained you as well.”
“But I was always so disappointing, so lacking in skill and finesse, compared to…”
“Me.”
Pathetic.
“He would talk about you sometimes,” Vicente continues. “Not often—you were like a secret, he didn’t want the other guilds to know about you. But it was obvious, all along, that he was comparing us—I could tell when he was doing it. You were his favourite, his perfect pupil—”
“Not an enviable position, I assure you.” Absurd, that Vicente could have coveted his relationship with Basadoni, gruelling and acidic as it was.
“He was my father. You were a thing he scraped off the streets.”
“More shameful, I suppose, to be surpassed by someone with none of your advantages.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“Because he’d ceased to be of use.”
Because Jarlaxle would have ordered you to do so.
There's almost the illusion of Kimmuriel's breath on his ear. He clamps his teeth together. I told you to be quiet.
“He was just an old man.”
“He was too easy to manipulate,” Entreri says. “He had no control over the guild, nor a grasp of what was happening on the streets except what his advisors allowed him to know. There was no reason for him to be alive.”
Vicente’s fist tightens on his swordhilt. “You decided that, did you?”
“He was already dead in almost every way that matters.”
“So you spared him, is that it?”
“No,” Entreri says. “I killed him.”
“Did your new allies order it? Did they pay you for it?”
“No one paid me to do it. No one ordered me to do it. I decided.” He’s speaking as much to Kimmuriel as to Vicente.
“You cold, sick—” Vicente knows that he’s wildly overstepped, that Entreri has killed people for less. But his mouth is twisted, raw-looking. “You were gone for years—and then you returned, and the entire ward went into chaos, and I knew it would end badly. I didn’t guess you’d murder my father and half his advisors, gut the guild, and appoint yourself guildmaster.”
“Would you rather have Sharlotta running things? I don’t think she’s fond of you.”
Vicente no longer hears him. “He talked about killing you once—after the d’Este job. He got your message by bird, and when he’d read it and burned it, he said, ‘Perhaps it’s time to do away with him.’ He knew what you were going to be. He knew he’d created something awful. You were already restless, asking to take contracts from other guilds, courting interest from all over the place… A person like you, doing the bidding of anyone rich enough to pay—he knew it would destabilise everything. He had a vial of thessali venom intended for you, and—”
“I know,” Entreri says. “He told me.” The betrayal hadn’t pricked him even then, at sixteen years old. By then he’d learned to expect it.
That steals Vicente’s bluster. “Why would he—”
“Because he knew I would find out. My spies were better than his. And because he never passed up an opportunity to tell me what a heartless wretch I was.”
Vicente has no quip or jibe for that, stunned quiet.
“Be thankful,” Entreri says, “that you weren’t your father’s son.”
He’s allowed Vicente to prattle for long enough that they’ve drawn an audience. The faces form and dissolve in his periphery, around the lip of the pit. Only Kimmuriel glares like a black paint-stroke against the canvas of ochre and white-blue.
He says, “You know why I’m here.”
Fatalism seems to settle upon Vicente, because he smiles. “Yes.”
“You admit it, then.”
“Admit what, pasha?”
“The arsenic.” Entreri treads a half-circle around him. “I found your messages.”
“Did you decipher them?”
“I didn’t need to.”
“Pity. You might have found it instructive—do you know the story? Let me remind you.” Vicente’s eyes are full of grim, unsavoury pleasure. “An adder's caught in a fire in the desert, and asks a passing camel driver for help—”
“I don’t need to hear it.”
“I think you do, pasha. Well, the camel driver is reluctant, knowing the adder’s venomous sting to be lethal, but at last he agrees, out of charity. So he hangs his saddle-bag over the adder, and it crawls inside and is lifted to safety. But as soon as the adder slithers out of the bag, it tells the camel driver that it means to sting him to death, because humans always return evil for good.”
Vicente's enjoying himself.
“The camel driver protests, saying that no creature alive would agree with such a judgement. So they consult a cow, and a palm tree, and a fox. The cow agrees: humans always repay a good turn with an evil one. The palm tree says the same: humans always repay a good turn with an evil one. But the fox, the fox laughs. He says he doesn’t believe the tale—such a large adder couldn’t fit inside so small a bag. The adder, being impatient to kill his quarry, crawls back inside the bag to prove it. But as soon as the adder’s inside, the fox tells the camel driver to tie up the bag, and dash it on the rocks—because any creature so lacking in gratitude deserves only death.”
There's a pause, in which Vicente relishes his conclusion. “My father told me that. I learned the lesson he was trying to teach—but he didn’t, I suppose.”
“Because I’m the snake.” Entreri lets his fingers scrape the pommel of his dagger.
“He gave you everything, and you repaid him with this—”
“I never asked for it.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“No, I didn’t. I suppose your father had quite the eye for the murderous potential of children.”
I could have extracted the information from him by now.
“You weren’t a child,” Vicente says. “I doubt you ever were. You came fully formed, like this—an inhuman thing.”
The words glance off him. “Now you sound like your father,” he says.
And he stabs Vicente.
The light has a white, hallucinatory quality, and Entreri is a black figure against it. Kimmuriel blinks, his eyes desiring to close, and nearly misses the flash of hand and blade. Entreri’s dagger knifes into the shoulder join of his victim’s padded armour.
It is a brief, trivial wound—but the man folds as though his soul has fled him. His sword clatters down. On his knees, he shakes with the effort of not screaming, and breathes almost in sobs.
Jarlaxle warned him about this weapon. It has a putrid energy: necrosis. Kimmuriel can ward himself against many things, but not such a leeching object.
Over Vicente’s gasps, Entreri says, “Who is your accomplice.”
Vicente looks up and laughs.
Calmly, Entreri raises the dagger. “You know what this is. Better for you that you tell me all of it now.”
“You’re going to kill me either way, I’m not going to fucking help you—”
“But how I do it depends on you.” With alarming speed, Entreri seizes Vicente by the neck of his armour and jabs the blade in again.
Vicente does not scream, but his breathing scrapes like a shriek in his throat. His every muscle locks, the cords in his neck quivering. “No—no, please,” his voice scales higher, louder, “please, no, no, no—”
Entreri withdraws the dagger. Vicente twitches and folds over, head lolling. “Stop,” he wheezes, “I’ll tell—I’ll tell you, just—”
“Good.”
Above them, humans are gathering. A veritable crowd to watch their captain cower before Entreri. They cannot hear what is being said, but they understand that punishment is being exacted. Kimmuriel pushes away the spittle of their thoughts.
Entreri seems not to notice them. He is watching the man at his feet. “Get up,” he says, and Vicente lumbers upright.
“Did you order the attendant to poison the wine.”
Vicente looks at him with abject hatred and says, “Yes.”
“Did she wish to do it.”
“No—she was terrified, begged me to choose someone else. I told her it wouldn’t be traced back to her, and then I ordered her to do it.”
Entreri’s eyes thin. The object of his revulsion is unclear. “I doubt that was the first lie you told her. Where did the arsenic come from.”
“A Raker. She gave it to me.”
Is that true. Entreri pushes it at him, crudely.
Kimmuriel delves through Vicente's dull mind as if through a drawer. It is twitchy and pained. Vicente wants to lie, but the dagger’s cold bite is too appalling. Yes.
“Who.”
“I don’t know her name.”
Extract it from him.
He is already seeking, but finds nothing, only lacunae. He lets his impatience bleed through where they touch. I cannot extract what he does not know.
“Describe her,” Entreri says aloud. On that cue, Kimmuriel begins to apply pressure. The subject’s mind shivers and buckles.
“I never saw her clearly.”
“High up in the ranks.”
“I, I think so…”
“How, then, did you come to meet.”
“I met a Raker contact—a friend—a tenday ago, at a tavern. We talked about how the ward was in disarray, how it would have been better if you’d never returned here. He asked if you could be removed, and I said I thought it was possible. Then she sent me a message a few days later, asking to meet.”
Idiot, Entreri thinks.
Quite.
“Did she know about Basadoni.”
“I don’t know.”
“And you agreed to a meeting.”
“She didn’t say much—only that we had interests in common. She gave me the arsenic, told me there’d be more, much more, if I was clever. Then she left.”
“Fortunately, you are not clever,” Entreri says. “Which is how we come to this. You’ll arrange another meeting.”
“No,” Vicente says. “There’s no—I’m meeting her soon, on the eighteenth—”
“When. Where.”
“Tenth bell, after nightfall—the Muzad, under the Coinchapel, near the Denos border…”
Entreri nods, his mind hissing with calculation. He says, “How many attempts to kill me did you intend to make.”
“As many as it took,” Vicente says. “More and more public, so that everyone can see how much you’re hated, what a liability you are. Eventually the whole guild will drive you out, or kill you.”
Entreri smiles thinly. You had competition, it seems.
Humans are not competition, Kimmuriel replies. In any sense. Is that all?
Why?
The rest is quick and surgical. Kimmuriel pulls out memories by the roots, careless of any collateral. As he does, he looks through Vicente’s eyes at Entreri. Hateful and exceptional: a monster built here, in this place, under Basadoni’s careful direction. Vicente’s fear of him is an endless vein.
Kimmuriel’s last measure is to leave something in place of all the ripped strands and wreckage. Entreri might rule this rabble of cutpurses and thugs; but he is still only human. Let this be a reminder.
Once it is finished, he gets up from the steps and brushes dust from his robe.
Entreri glares. What have you done.
When he wakes, he will not remember his vendetta. He will harbour no ill will toward you. He will desire only to serve you—with absolute devotion.
No.
Consider it a mercy. I could crack his mind like glass. Humans are weak.
Vicente blinks. “Pasha?”
“Dismissed,” Entreri says. “Go—get out.”
Stricken, Vicente bows low and rushes the steps, out of the pit.
Entreri remains where he is, glaring around at the crowding soldiers until they hurry to disperse. The grumblings have given way to shock and grudging admiration, even among those who wish to see him dead.
Slowly, Kimmuriel approaches.
Entreri turns his head. His eyes are flat and dark. I will take this to Jarlaxle, before he follows through on his threat of using the shard.
No, Kimmuriel replies. We will take this to Jarlaxle.
They reach the guildhouse in silence, and Kimmuriel starts toward the staircase down. The sooner this is done—
“He’s not down there,” Entreri says aloud. Kimmuriel stops. “He’s in the pasha’s rooms.”
From beyond the bedroom doors, they hear laughter and laboured breathing.
Two groggy minds drift at him like smoke. Kimmuriel pulls back from the chaotic thrumming of their pleasure. He had hoped not to find Jarlaxle in the middle of carnalities—in vain, it seems.
“Wonderful,” Entreri mutters, giving off faint discomfort. Interesting.
Without touching the handles, Kimmuriel parts the doors, and obscures himself before entering.
A pastille burner hangs from the ceiling, glowing. It gives off a thick, sweet perfume which reminds him, untowardly, of home. The air is as warm as a bath.
On the overlarge bed, two humans are copulating. They are male and Calishite, their brown bodies covered with coarse black hair. The larger human pins down the other, broad muscles churning in his back and thighs. It is almost hypnotic, like animals rutting.
From an armchair against the wall, another figure looks on. His skin is brown and his ears rounded, but his features are too fine for a human face—Jarlaxle, under an illusion. He is clothed, and watching the humans with vague interest, chin propped in one hand and a wine glass in the other.
Noticing Entreri, the creatures on the bed disentangle, and scramble to cover themselves with sheets.
“Pasha—”
Their thoughts are noisy and slow. Noxious, like smog. It would be no effort to make them walk off the balcony. Instead Kimmuriel must fend off the sensory debris of what they were just doing.
“Go on,” Jarlaxle tells his two amusements, nodding toward the baths in an adjoining room. It is dismaying to hear him speak Common, to see him smile at them so; but it is worse that he is wearing their skin. “I’ll join you shortly.”
They look to Entreri, who says sharply, “Dismissed.” That sends them off in haste, the doors banging after them.
Kimmuriel says, “What are you…”
“This?” Jarlaxle holds out both hands, gesturing to himself. “I think it’s rather good, don’t you?” His hand tips, wine swaying in his glass. “Fascinating, humans.”
He stands, fingering the opal ring on his left hand. The illusion rubs itself out.
“Fascinating,” Kimmuriel intones. “Who are they?”
“Basadoni’s former guards,” says Entreri, and his discomfort comes stronger, yellow and jaundiced.
“They believe I’m a lieutenant, newly elevated.”
Kimmuriel tries to collect himself. It is too hot, his senses are swimming. “We agreed that we would not reveal ourselves.”
“I confess, I’ve revealed plenty,” that damnable smirk, “but nothing that compromises our presence here.” In the face of his disbelief Jarlaxle adds, “Look at their minds, if you wish.”
“I would rather not.”
Jarlaxle chuckles. “So prudish, my friends. Now, I assume you have something for me.”
Kimmuriel folds his hands together. Before he can speak, however, Entreri says, “The poisoner has been dealt with.”
“I’m pleased to hear it. Who was it?”
“A disgruntled soldier. No one of importance. His accomplice,” Entreri hesitates, though it is slight, “is a Raker—a woman of high rank.”
“A Raker,” Jarlaxle says, and the atmosphere in the room turns.
“There’s no evidence to suggest other Rakers are involved.”
“But of course they are. They’d like nothing more than to cut you down and cripple the rest of the guild doing it. They’re already turning our people against us.”
“He was easily turned.”
“Personal enmity?”
“Something like that.”
“Hm,” Jarlaxle says. “And you want the trade negotiations to continue, even as we hunt one of their number?”
“Yes.”
“It would be easier, you know. To snuff them all out.”
Entreri tenses. When he speaks, however, it is low and canted with amusement; calm. “I didn’t realise you did things for ease.”
The tip of Jarlaxle’s head might as well be a guffaw. “Rarely. When is the meeting?”
“Five days’ time—the night of the eighteenth.”
“Where?”
“In the sewers, the other side of the ward.”
“A good place to spring a trap.”
“Isn’t it,” Entreri says, quietly.
Jarlaxle smiles. “I want you to bring me this Raker.”
“I will.”
“And when you have, we’ll see what’s to be done about the rest of them.”
Jarlaxle looks at Entreri a moment longer, then sets down his wine untouched and turns his face away. He is looking out across the city again.
“You needn't involve yourself in this further,” Entreri says. “These are the affairs of humans, after all.”
It is a relief to be in the cool darkness of a subterranean corridor. Kimmuriel’s eyes ache. “I have my orders from Jarlaxle.”
“As if you have any regard for those.”
He turns so sharply that vertigo makes his vision spill. “I have worked with him for years. I will go on working with him when you are bones in the dust. Do not tell me what I have regard for.”
“I don’t require your assistance,” Entreri says. “Unsurprisingly, it’s no use at all.”
The walls have begun to liquefy. Kimmuriel blinks, and blinks again. He is too warm; sweat has slid down his breastbone, dampening his shirt. His hair sticks to his neck. “We will reconvene shortly before the meeting.”
“What about Vicente.”
“You mean to send him to his meeting with the Raker.” That is why Entreri left him alive. “In the meantime, you may do as you please with him. He will let you.”
“Undo it,” Entreri says, in the same tone with which he commanded his officer.
“No.”
“I don’t need him addled to keep him under control.”
“Perhaps not,” Kimmuriel says, ”and that is the point, is it not? You use your influence to make them fear you, threats to make them obey you, pain and pressure to make them act against themselves—”
“I didn’t violate his mind.”
“No, only his soul.” He takes a step toward Entreri. Blood is beating in his face, his lips. “How does it feel, feeding on others like a vampire? Did he leave a taste?”
Entreri breathes shallowly, thoughts glowing and swelling. Like the glint off a prism, Kimmuriel catches the edge of that rage.
He could reach out his hand and touch Entreri. It is an odd sensation, to move so little a distance but feel as though he is plummeting from a great height. “I’ll leave him to you. As a reminder.”
Entreri will attack him. Violence is quaking through Entreri’s body. And yet he cannot resist—
If I am disgusting, what are you?
Without a further word, Entreri walks away.
He is so very hot—it is intolerable, this heat, it is like a madness.
In his bedchamber he strips off his robe, pitching it over a chair with a distracted splash of energy. He unbuttons his sleeve cuffs, and the front of his shirt, halfway. There is a pitcher on the washstand, filled by the attendants who visit his bedchamber. Dizzily, he sinks his hands into the cool water and presses them to his face and neck.
As they spoke, he became aware of a discomfort. There is an ache very low in his abdomen, and his trousers feel—constrictive. He staggers a little, revolted.
The body is a trap for the mind, Izyr taught him, and considered it a lesson worth repeating. This is an aberrant response, nothing more; it is the heat, the light, the persistent blare of the city, Entreri's distasteful presence, the scuttling and muttering of humans everywhere. It signifies nothing.
“Kimmuriel?”
He turns to see the door already open. Rai’gy steps in, glancing about, and Kimmuriel realises that the furniture is rattling. With effort, he chokes off his power.
“You look—” Rai’gy clicks his tongue. “Well, I’ve been treating men with heat exhaustion who look better than you.”
Kimmuriel sinks onto the bed, dragging the silk bedclothes over his lap. “I am not ill,” he says, “it is—”
“When did you last take reverie?”
“It has been… a number of days.” Difficult to recall. “I think a sleeping draught would be… prudent.”
It is as he was taught: the body is a trap for the mind. He is out of sorts; it is merely an anomaly. All will be well after he has slept.
“I’ll do you one better. Lie down.”
He does, and Rai’gy’s hand comes to rest on his brow.
The wards, he thinks; and there is the spectre of Entreri under his eyelids, that dark potent shape, those clever grey eyes—before blackness rolls over him.
Chapter 7
Notes:
Belated note on worldbuilding: the first chapter of Servant of the Shard features a pretty vile racist caricature, so it's probably for the best that Salvatore depicts Calimport as ‘generic fantasy city’ after that. The original concept for Calimport was very ‘Arabian Nights’, heavy on the Orientalism, so instead I've followed the subsequent sourcebooks for Calimshan/Calimport, which took more from Byzantine & Ottoman Turkey. Mostly I'm borrowing from early 12th-century Constantinople, with some medieval Persian influences.
Chapter Text
“I was just about to look in on you,” Rai’gy says, when Kimmuriel enters his chambers. “Has your temperature come down?”
“I believe so.” His limbs feel tired and unfamiliar. His thoughts move like tar.
“You’ll be groggy a while. I’m told my sleep spells are—“
“Excessive,” Kimmuriel supplies. He takes the other chair.
“‘Like a mallet to the head’, was the phrase someone used—but yes. Have some tea.”
“Thank you.”
The imp serves them both. Rai’gy says, “At risk of stating the obvious, you can’t forego reverie for days on end, it’s not viable. If you keep going like this, I’ll have to advise Jarlaxle to take you off duty.”
Rai’gy has threatened him thus once before: during the difficult months after he joined the company, when anger drove him recklessly into his work.
“He would not agree to that.”
“You’re the least expendable of all of us, in his eyes. He’ll have you packed off back to Menzoberranzan as soon as I say the words ‘danger to himself and those around him’.”
“I am not.”
“Why haven’t you been resting?”
“I have had difficulty settling to it.”
“You’re also showing signs of sun-sickness.”
“Minimal exposure.”
“I know it when I see it. You’re only the twenty-sixth case recorded in the last three days. Is it because of the human—that poisoning attempt? Is that why you’re walking around in scalding daylight?”
“That is part of it.”
“And this work can’t be done at night.”
“As it concerns humans—no.”
“These conditions are deplorable,” Rai’gy says. “We’re not meant to live in places like this. The sun is poisonous. Half the men have been treated for afflictions from the light, the heat, or both. And in the meantime Jarlaxle insists on daytime operations, exposing us to it directly.”
“Have you brought the afflictions to him?”
“Oh, he gets the same reports from the healers I do. When I tell him about the men who have fallen sick, he’s greatly sympathetic. He visits them, talks to them. He approves all the requisition requests, all the healing supplies, whatever’s needed and more. And then he goes on ordering scoutings and missions in the middle of the day—as if he doesn’t know, or doesn’t care. He just presses on. I can’t fathom what’s going on in that head, it’s like dealing with two different people.”
“Tendays we have been here,” Kimmuriel says, “with no sign of this excursion winding down.”
“The men aren’t pleased. The mood’s turning fast, I tell you.”
“And then what?”
“I’ve no idea. This isn’t like an attack going awry, or acting on erroneous information. We’re hundreds of miles from home, in hostile territory, under brutally harmful conditions, where one wrong move could get us all gutted on human swords.” Rai'gy sighs. “We’ll wait, and monitor the situation. What else can we do?”
“Nothing, for now.”
“On a different subject—I’d like to get your thoughts on a theory, if you’ve time and the inclination.”
“Yes,” Kimmuriel says, and there is a great relief in turning toward scholarly work. “By all means.”
“So, you’ll recall that I was attempting to prempt any incidence of over-excitation during property transferral…”
Entreri wakes tangled with his sheets, sweating.
It’s been three nights of this. Dreams he doesn’t remember, suffused with a deep, heavy want.
He used to have dreams about Drizzt, at the height of their involvement when the hatred was almost too large and violent to contain. Dreams that—
He kicks away the sheets. The tray of coffee waits outside the door—with a message from Jarlaxle.
Shall we?
He arrives at the front gate as the sun’s setting. Jarlaxle’s waiting for him, wearing that bizarre human disguise. Entreri has to squint against the sinking gold light to see through it.
“Good evening, abbil.”
The air’s still warm, and Naiid Sabban is crowded. The doors to the taverns are open, tables full—smells of tobacco and hashish, and coalsmoke from ovens and the braziers being lit.
“Come,” Jarlaxle says, and nods at the westward road. “Let’s go this way.”
Entreri frowns. “To the slums?”
“I told you I wanted to see the city, didn’t I? Warts and all.”
Over the next half an hour the ground underfoot degrades, heat-cracked and pitted. Presently, they enter the slums which edge the ward’s prosperous middle. Many roads converge here, and Entreri looks left—from where he’s standing, he can see part of the street he claimed when he was eight.
The ragged awnings are different colours—he remembers the exact patchwork, and where they were stripped bare white by the sun—but the sagging, dilapidated buildings crusted with reddish mud are the same. The stink, the flies, the rotting; they’re the same.
They see a few figures sitting around a cookfire. One of them is playing a pipe—the high, breathy notes carry on the still air. It’s so familiar that all Entreri’s skin prickles at it. He used to listen to a woman play from where he lay down to sleep on the roof of an abandoned house.
Jarlaxle stands in the middle of the street, head swivelling in every direction, taking it in. “How much of Calimport is like this?”
“Most of it.”
“How many people is that? Hundreds of thousands?”
“More than a million.”
“Like you.”
“I’m not from here.”
Even Jarlaxle’s passing glance is too knowing. “Somewhere like this.”
He doesn’t answer that. “Come on.”
“Are we leaving already?”
Sarcastically, “Is this enlightening? Do you wish to peruse the slave quarters next? The public gallows?”
At the next fork of roads he leads Jarlaxle south. He doesn’t want to look at this place any longer, Jarlaxle’s morbid curiosity be damned.
“Bleak,” Jarlaxle says, as they pass scores of tents, wooden shelters, and crumbling mudbrick houses. “My people exist in a state of constant, pointless war, and yet I’d consider their lot happier than this.” He gestures at a gap in the rickety boards. Two boys are bawling at a woman who’s hunched over, trying to sew. “Are these humans lettered? Do they know basic arithmetic?”
“I doubt it.”
“All drow are educated—even the lowliest, even those with nothing. There are schoolhouses in the slums.”
“Indoctrinated, you mean,” Entreri says.
“Well, that is the point, yes. How else would the Lolthites keep their grip on the city?”
“Obviously it doesn’t work on everyone.” They turn right onto the broad street toward Kaval, a part of the ward Entreri used to know well. “The indoctrination.”
“You assume I was.”
“If you grew up there, you were. It’s in the air.”
“It’s quite insidious,” Jarlaxle agrees. “And I was educated, of course.” He grins a little. ”Just not in the way they hoped.”
Some minutes later, they round a corner and pass through gates manned by soldiers. On the other side, there are rows of apartments made of marble and white plaster, tall and clean, and the street is shaded by date palms.
“So,” Jarlaxle says, “why are you different?”
“Why are you?”
A smile. “Fortune and misfortune are curious melding forces, wouldn’t you agree?”
Cryptic as ever, then.
The market square is thronged with people. There’s a certain unrest in the crowd—a tenor to the conversations, furtive looks, fewer children than would be expected. The nearest Raker outpost is only a street away, and Entreri recalls reports of fighting here. Three dead, one a servant unfortunate enough to be nearby.
“Who’s that?” Jarlaxle asks, pointing at the statue in the centre.
“Ali el Samesaj,” Entreri says. “Probably the most notable wizard in the city’s history. He protected it during the beholder siege at Akkabbel a thousand years ago—created a portal that allowed the garrison to receive reinforcements. The syl-pasha Ruj el Drakhon made him grand vizar in reward.”
“A statue of a man is a most unusual thing to see.”
“Not here. Here, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else.”
“Hm. Do you know a lot of history?”
“Too much.”
They begin to cross the square, pushing through people drinking and smoking, dodging between market stalls and dice tables.
It takes longer than it would’ve done, years ago, but the effect is the same. A man in the crowd marks him, and pulls the woman beside him away—fear in one face, suspicion in another. Soon people start to scatter, muttering and grabbing for their children as they retreat from him, staring blatantly or turning away as if afraid even to look in his direction.
Jarlaxle, observing this, turns to him with a sly little grin. “It practically borders on superstition. Is this usual?”
“Usually I don’t walk these streets without a disguise.”
“But now you do.”
“Now,” Entreri says, “it’s an open secret that Basadoni is dead, and the guild is mine. It seems unwise to hide inside my guildhouse and let the gossip fester.”
He expects a glib remark; but Jarlaxle nods, seeming for a moment almost grave. “You are the guild. Appearances are crucial.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then—perhaps we should display you where they can see you. Any ideas?”
Entreri leads him to a coffeehouse. It’s busy this hour of the day: the tables in front are full of chatter and trades, the clatter of dice, the genteel clinking of china and spoons. A man is selling coffee from a stall. Entreri purchases two cups, and they sit.
Jarlaxle drinks without seeming to notice the taste. He’s gazing across the square, deep in his thoughts. Entreri can read that look: he’s seen it before, but not so vividly.
“I used to wonder if you were representative of your kind,” Jarlaxle says. “But that isn’t the case at all, is it? These creatures,” a wide gesture, “they’re slow-witted, fearful…”
“I’d say the same of the ordinary drow I met.”
“But in Menzoberranzan their lives are part of a plan. A grotesque one, certainly—but a plan nevertheless.”
“And?”
“I’ve been thinking about our plans for this place, and how small-minded they were. Given our profits—and our prospects—the thing to do now, I believe, is expand.”
“Expand,” Entreri says, flatly. “And what does that mean.”
“I want to construct a tower, very like the one in which you fought Drizzt.”
It’s such a bizarre proposition that he can barely digest it. “Where?”
“Here.”
“What?” The tower Jarlaxle constructed in the North was vast—as large as a sabban, perhaps fully half a ward. “There’s already something here. Many things.”
“All this?” A wide hand wave. “Frivolous. Unimportant.”
Only hundreds of houses, an entire market, half a dozen coffeehouses and taverns, a guildhall, and scores of shops and stalls and opportunistic nooks doing steady business. His mind blanches at an attempt to imagine a great bright tower of glass in place of this crowded labyrinth of streets and shaded, secretive alleys.
“I thought you appreciated frivolity.”
“Only where it does not interfere with goals of greater worth.”
“You’re considering conjuring a tower in the centre of one of the most populous wards in the city. You might as well set half the ward on fire.”
“On the contrary—the result will be more order, not less.”
“Even if that were a possible outcome—and it isn’t—it would be madness to draw that kind of attention to yourself.”
“And why should I hide?”
“Because you’re drow, and they’ll execute you. All of you. You’d be selling your men out for a tower.”
“The humans shan’t harm us,” Jarlaxle says, “I’ll make sure of that. Besides, I have great ambitions for this place—far greater than letting nine-tenths of the population rot in squalor, when they might be part of a great prosperity. The rulers of this place will come to understand that, and share it.”
For a moment, looking into Jarlaxle’s eyes is like gazing into the Clawrift, or the implacable black of the sea at night: a yearning open hunger. Something about it seems unworldly.
“Plenty of others before you have had great and glorious ambitions.” Entreri’s pulse has picked up. “They’re not glorious in practice.”
He’s listened to puffed up aristocrats and ambitious pashas speak of conquering parts of the city, even dethroning the caleph and ruling Calimshan in his stead. All of it just so much hot air. But Jarlaxle is calmly sincere, as though what he’s saying is quite reasonable and not at all deranged.
“Because they lacked the power to execute them. That’s a limitation I don’t have.”
“It wasn’t power they lacked.” He recalls a fragment from a history book he read years ago: Calimshan has never wanted for tyrants. “It was reason, and a sense of reality.”
Jarlaxle’s lips thin, his jaw gone tight. “Tell me, my friend—what is reasonable about all this waste? All this lack? All this potential, gone unrealised?”
“What solution is a tower?”
“It’s a symbol of power, of our supremacy—”
“It’s an intimidation tactic, and it will fail. You talk of waste—what about all your men dead, and everything you’ve sought to build here wrecked beyond all rescue?”
“Ah, my friend. If you’ve a deficiency, it’s a lack of vision.”
“While you manage not to see what’s right in front of you,” Entreri says, even as he knows that he’s overstepped a line. “If your ambition makes you blind, it’s nothing to crow about.”
With that, Jarlaxle’s eyes become pale-lashed slits. “I am not—”
“A sample, sir?”
They both turn. A man dressed in white is approaching their table, bearing a tray of tiny blue glass vials.
Chameleon-like, any shade of anger has already faded from Jarlaxle’s face. He’s the very picture of affable curiosity. “What is it?”
“Lavender oil, harvested from high on Mount Abbalayat. You won’t find better in Calimshan.”
The man seems to have approached them idly; but he was savvy enough to pass over half the people nearby and come straight to Jarlaxle. “I suggest applying it to the wrists and throat, sir.”
Taking a vial, Jarlaxle rolls up his sleeves and touches a little to his left wrist, which he rubs against his right. He sniffs it delicately. “Oh, magnificent.” He has a wondering gleam in his eye. “What do you think?”
Even before he holds up his bare wrist, Entreri is breathing it: a warm smell—woody, but strongly sweet.
“I think you’ve found a way to be even more obnoxious than you are now.”
Jarlaxle chuckles. “I do like to stand out from a crowd.”
“You like to be entirely unmissable. I imagine it’s a wrench for you to go about disguised.”
“Part of having a reputation, my friend, is that it must be cultivated. You yourself know that well.”
“I’m not sure what cloying floral scents will gain you, apart from being mistaken for a bouquet or a very expensive prostitute.”
“Oh no, this is all just fancy.”
“Frivolous, you might call it.”
Jarlaxle breathes out, tremulously enough that it could nearly be a laugh. “You can make a blade of anything, can’t you.”
“Professional habit.”
Inevitably, he trails Jarlaxle to the perfumier’s establishment, a muggy hothouse of plants grown wild and shelves of dried herbs and oil jars. As the last of the day’s light retreats across the floor, he leans against the doorjamb, watching Jarlaxle pelt the purveyor with questions.
“How do you extract the oil? Is it a mechanical process, or a magical one?”
Entreri feels no particular urge to hurry things along, and wonders where this reservoir of patience in himself came from. Jarlaxle is absorbed, at least, which seems far preferable to grim talk of expansion and conquest.
Finally, Jarlaxle hands over a great sum of gold for four vials of lavender oil, and they emerge into the darkening street.
Nearby is a building ablaze with light: the oldest tavern in the sabban. The front is shabby, dark red paint peeling to show scuffs of white stone beneath: It’s four storeys high, and every window and balcony is full of people.
Jarlaxle doesn’t even speak; he simply heads straight for it.
“Ah, now this—”
They push their way to the bar. Entreri, vigilant, is looking for any probable threats when Jarlaxle touches him low on his back. Surprise jumps up his spine. “What’ll you have?”
“Honey mead.”
“A honey mead for my friend here,” Jarlaxle tells the barkeep. “And a large cup of anise wine, if you would.” To Entreri, he says, “Your people do love sweetness. Not that I blame them. I began importing honey to Menzoberranzan about four months ago, and the demand’s been impossible to meet ever since. The noble houses hardly know what to do with it—I think they’re secretly eating it raw.”
“I don’t recall sweets there.”
“No. Fermentation is the nearest we’ve had.” Jarlaxle accepts the cup of wine, and then the mead. “The surface is full of things like that. Unexpected pleasures.” His voice falls, so low that Entreri has to lean nearer to hear him. “It’s strange to realise… even after many years of life, that you’ve wanted something without knowing of it.” Suddenly, he smiles. “Upstairs?”
The tavern is arranged around a small courtyard with a shallow pool. Bent tree trunks push up through the mosaic floor, and their greenery has wound up the pillars and up the inner stone walls: it covers every rail and landing in dark dense leaves, and hangs like thick drapery between the levels. Parts of it have begun to bloom with delicate yellow and white flowers.
“Oh my,” Jarlaxle says, reaching out to stir a curtain of leafy vines as they climb. “This is quite lovely.”
As they climb, Entreri overhears scraps of conversation; and more than once, his own name. This sabban, too, is alarmed by their constant border scuffles with the Rakers, waiting for the conflict to escalate.
On the fourth floor Jarlaxle puts his back to the rail, the loose lean of his body like an invitation. Entreri joins him there, resting an elbow on the stone.
Nearby, five men are crammed around a hobbled table and an oil lamp to play cards. Jarlaxle studies them. “What is that game?”
“As-nas,” Entreri says. “Poker. Do you want to be dealt in.”
“No, I think I’ll observe for the moment.”
Play proceeds, with much bluffing and bravado. While still watching them, Jarlaxle says, “How are you getting along with Kimmuriel?”
Entreri takes three deep sips of mead, pleasantly cold in his mouth. “I think you know the answer to that. He’s abrasive, arrogant—difficult.”
“He’s the youngest of my company, you know,” Jarlaxle says. “Only reached his first century nine years ago. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have brought on someone so young, I need men with significant experience of combat and subterfuge—but, well, I had to have him: he’s an exquisite rarity. And he absorbs things like a sponge: I need only put him in a room with more seasoned men and he learns everything they know in short order.”
The last few days reorientate sharply.
“You’re surprised,” Jarlaxle says, with a little grin. “You thought him older. He does have that quality—far more mature than his years.”
“You’ve had me working with someone who’s barely past his majority,” Entreri says. “And you put us together… so that he could learn from me.”
“In many things, Kimmuriel is inexperienced. Given the choice, he’d spend his time pursuing esoteric research into his own domain—which is all well and good, and will only make him more formidable. But I felt it necessary to steep him in matters more… worldly. I want him to learn about the surface, and about humans—how they do business, how they live, how they think. I’m sure you’ve already taught him a great deal.”
“Hells,” Entreri mutters.
“I doubt he’s been a burden.”
“Apart from the unending bile that comes out of his mouth?”
“I’ll admit, Kimmuriel seems to have taken against you more than I’d expected. I think you’ve rather upset his way of looking at the world. But I’ve told him he must cooperate, and so he shall.”
“I’d hate to be on the receiving end of uncooperative, then.”
“Ah, that’s all merely for display,” Jarlaxle says.
Entreri has to suppress his reply to that, and they stand silent for a while, watching the game. As a round of betting begins and an auburn-haired man drops a silver into the heap with a flourish, Jarlaxle remarks, “He seems confident.”
“He’s bluffing,” Entreri replies quietly. “He started with a bad hand—he’s frustrated, and it’s distracting him. Now he’s betting too quickly, to hide that he’s raising the pot only by small increments. As you’d say, it’s all display.”
Jarlaxle chuckles. “Really.”
“I know bluffing when I see it.”
Two players remain, the pot between them a sizeable heap of silver and gold. One throws down his hand, and the man with auburn hair groans and curses.
“You whoreson—”
“Ah, don’t be sore—”
Jarlaxle shifts his weight, and their shoulders brush. “Something to remember,” he says, a smile in his voice, “as you proceed. Kimmuriel’s survival instincts are incredibly strong—as strong as yours, I’d wager. Don’t for a moment underestimate what he might do, if he feels threatened. He’s been known to surprise even me.”
Wonderful. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Good. Now, I think I’d like to play.” He turns to Entreri. “Will you partake as well?”
“No,” Entreri says. “If I play, they’ll throw every game. You want a challenge, not a display of subservience to me.”
“Very well.” Jarlaxle stands straight, and sidles toward the table. “Good evening, friends! Deal me in, if you would be so kind.”
The faces are all writ with suspicion, which lasts only as long as it takes for Jarlaxle to set two stacks of gold coins on the table before him. “I’m good for it, of course.”
“Ah, go on then,” one of them says. “What’re you called?”
“Hero, to my friends.”
Entreri, incredulous, draws up a chair just beyond the ring of lamplight, so that he’s sitting in Jarlaxle’s shadow, and pretends not to watch.
“Ha!”
To his surprise, Jarlaxle loses the first game. As one of his opponents gathers up the winnings with an immodest sweep of the arm, Jarlaxle taps the rim of Entreri’s empty cup. “More of this?”
“All right.”
He watches Jarlaxle signal a serving-boy. “Another for my friend and me, if you would.” It’s brought, and Jarlaxle clacks their cups together.
Another game begins. Jarlaxle’s talking now, telling them an outlandish story about a fantastic haul at a gambler’s den in Baldur’s Gate. He’s in his element, and it strikes Entreri as a bizarre scene, in the midst of the politicking and unrest. These people have no idea who Jarlaxle is, nor what he intends to do to them. They’re drawn to him, in the way that everyone seems to be drawn.
As time goes on, Jarlaxle’s cheating grows more and more flagrant. The other players are—somehow—oblivious, but Entreri, sitting at his left, has a better vantage of what he’s doing. During the next hand Jarlaxle simply disappears a card from the table, and Entreri thinks to warn him before the game ends in violence.
Faster, Jarlaxle touches his arm, and leans very close, and his stomach swoops. “Hush,” Jarlaxle murmurs, breath hot on his ear. “Don’t let on.”
So Entreri sits back, sipping mead, and watches him rob five humans blind.
When Jarlaxle throws down his last hand, four kings and an ace, his two remaining opponents grunt in dismay, but they don’t protest. He’s entertained them with his chatter, his stories, his witty grin.
“Thank you, my friends.” Jarlaxle begins sweeping up his winnings into a pouch. Then he seems to rethink, and splashes a handful of coins back onto the table. “Drinks for yourselves,” he says. Shouts of appreciation and enticements to keep playing reach after them as he leaves. Entreri puts aside his cup and follows him.
“Ah, that was excellent.”
“Generous of you,” Entreri says, with mild disapproval.
“Oh, the coins are illusory—they disappear within minutes of being conjured. I imagine it’ll cause quite a fuss shortly.”
“Why…” He doesn’t even know what question he means to ask.
Jarlaxle laughs. “Give up my winnings? I think not. Come, come, let’s have another round.”
“The roof, then,” Entreri says, gesturing him up the narrow, pitted steps. He goes. “Where they won’t find you.”
“They’ll not threaten me,” Jarlaxle calls back down. “I’m with you.”
After some searching, Entreri finds one of the kitchen hands hefting a winejar up from the cellars. “Are the kitchens still serving?”
She smears her dusty hands on her apron, and then her eyes change when she realises who he is. “A—about to close, master.”
He hands her four bicentas. “Keep them open a short while, and bring us some shashlik. And some rose wine. Two glasses.”
“Yes, master.”
The night has deepened, the stars crowding and bright. He steps out onto the roof, which is covered haphazardly with faded reddish rugs, and finds Jarlaxle already seated at a low table. A moth quivers around the oil lamp.
“Come here often?” Jarlaxle says, setting his hat down nearby.
Entreri sits on the cushion on the other side. “I used to meet informants here, on occasion.”
Jarlaxle rests his cheek in his hand. There’s a slight flush to his face. Rather than dulling him, the blood makes him luminously dark. Behind him the moon is silver and almost full, like a piece of platinum. “This has been—enlightening.”
“The intricacies of five-card draw?”
“Oh, intricacies, certainly.”
Their food is brought, and a small carafe of wine. He lets Jarlaxle try the meat first: he’s been wary of food served to him since returning to Calimport, and Vicente’s efforts, incompetent as they were, haven’t helped matters.
Jarlaxle, swallowing, grins at him. “Delicious. Do have some, my friend.”
After they’ve eaten, Jarlaxle unfastens his eyepatch and pockets it. Entreri is fighting a certain lassitude: the wine, the heat, the late hour; and so he doesn’t immediately sense danger when Jarlaxle says, “I’ve been thinking.”
“That makes a change.” It’s easy now to fall into this rhythm of repartee, another kind of sparring.
“Very witty.” Jarlaxle wafts the air as if to clear it of his sarcasm. “No, it occurred to me… how improbable all this is.”
“You’re not the first drow to come to Calimport, but you are the gaudiest.”
“I might have missed you, those years ago. Might never have become aware of your existence at all. It was only by chance—a whim, really.”
“Do you do anything except on a whim.”
“I’m sure you know I do. In that instance, I’d just learned that Vierna Do’Urden was still alive, and hellbent on capturing her blasphemous younger brother. An unusual case, Drizzt was, and I’ll admit I had a certain… vested interest in him. So I decided to look for him by magical means. And when I found him, he was here—of all places—and he was fighting you. To the death, apparently.”
Entreri says grimly, “It should have been.”
“It showed,” Jarlaxle says. “I hadn’t seen a fight like that in centuries. The two of you… it was magnificent, truly. And then,” he lifts his cup, his eyes smiling as he drinks, “and then you spat sewer water in his face, and I knew I had to meet you.”
Entreri feels his mouth curve at the memory. “Is that something you find particularly appealing? You should have told me, I could have saved some for you.”
Jarlaxle laughs heartily, his whole body given over to it. When he subsides, he leans back in his chair and says, “I’m sure there’ve been many occasions when you thought about spitting at me.”
It’s like a cloud skidding across the sun; a shadow falling over them. Tension pulls through Entreri’s ribcage.
There’s no apology in the look Jarlaxle gives him. “My friend, I hope you know—that everything I’ve done, I did because I saw such potential in you.”
“Is that why.”
In the months since he escaped, his mind has whittled down the experience, stripping off the layers of horror and fury to leave only the hollow core, the body going through motions. Menzoberranzan has reduced to grey, bland scraps, though he knows every day was slow torture, and the threat of violent death was like breath on the back of his neck.
Abhorrently, he understands why Jarlaxle kept him captive there. It shattered him: the shock of a culture in love with killing, the humiliation, the claustrophobic sense of being unable to escape both the drow and himself. It left him without direction, writhing in self-hatred. Killing Drizzt mended nothing, only clarified where he was broken. He still doesn’t know what he wants, and that somehow makes him as susceptible to Jarlaxle as the man with fanatical purpose who set out from Calimport years ago.
“There are very few people who gain my interest,” Jarlaxle continues, softly. “Fewer still who keep it.” He rests his chin in his hand. “But you… I didn’t expect you.”
Jarlaxle’s face is easily given to smiling, with degrees of insincerity and mockery; but the warmth of his eyes is still like a secreted blade to the ribs. Entreri feels hot and cold at once. “Good,” he says.
Then Jarlaxle looks away, over the illuminated roof gardens and minarets. “It seems to me that you could have ruled this place.”
“I already have, in the only way I cared to,” Entreri says. “I’m not a ruler.”
“I know. It’s not where your strengths lie. You excel in secrecy, and precision, and never being anticipated.” Jarlaxle shifts forward, both elbows rested on the table. “Once we’re fully established here, I won’t need a front man any longer. But I should like an advisor.”
“You’ll still need a front. No one will deal directly with drow.”
“They will,” Jarlaxle says. “They’ll deal with me—and you.”
And Jarlaxle touches his hand, fingers light on his.
It’s strange to be so conscious of being manipulated; he feels almost complicit in it. The sensation is magnified: Jarlaxle’s rough, warm fingertips; the warmed metal of a ring against his knuckle. He’s rooted there, wanting and not wanting to pull away.
“You must decide… what you want from all this.”
The light burnishes the rise of Jarlaxle’s cheek, and his full lower lip. Puts motes in his eyes—clever, lively eyes, with pale eyelashes which bring out the deep jewel red of his irises. It’s a face that speaks of delicacy, and generosity. It’s the kind of face Entreri, with his well-developed dislike of aristocrats, should hate. Jarlaxle is someone he should hate. It troubles him that he doesn’t.
“You may not know now,” Jarlaxle goes on—that same soft, coaxing tone. “But you will. You simply need to discover more of what’s possible. So many things you could have.”
“And you,” Entreri says, dry-mouthed. “What do you want.”
“Ah, well,” Jarlaxle says, “that is the thing. The more I see, the more I want. I haven’t yet seen all there is to see, but… well, I mean to have everything.”
Entreri thinks of a tower growing obscenely in the middle of the city; and yet, despite his disquiet, his mouth twitches. “Is that all.”
Jarlaxle, too, grins. “Achievable goals, khal'abbil.”
He applies a slight pressure to Entreri’s hand, and lets go. Reaching for the carafe, he splashes another measure of wine into his cup. He’s not drunk, but his movements have a deliberateness which says that the alcohol’s having an effect.
Entreri expects him to talk, but he doesn’t. Instead, he rests his back against the wall and looks up at the sky, and sighs.
They finish the wine. A warm breeze picks up.
Jarlaxle murmurs, “Ah, it’s good to be away from paperwork.”
Entreri stirs. “I suspect that pile grows of its own accord when I’m not looking at it.”
“Doesn’t it just? The administrative complexities of operating here are legion.”
He’s weary, Entreri realises. For the first time in his recollection, Jarlaxle sounds tired.
“Well,” Jarlaxle says. “You’ve given me much food for thought. But now, regrettably, I must return. Will you walk with me?”
Their journey back through the streets is more direct. Once inside the guildhouse, they wander toward Entreri’s rooms and Jarlaxle leans upon the door.
“You’ll consider my offer, I hope.”
“Yes,” Entreri says, knowing it’ll never come to that. Either he’ll convince Jarlaxle of another course, or they’ll both be killed.
“There’s much we could accomplish here, together.”
They look at each other. He wonders if Jarlaxle will ask to come in. If Jarlaxle expects to be asked. What any of this means.
“This was… a very fine evening,” Jarlaxle says. “Thank you, my friend.”
Then he takes his leave, with a smile that rouses some odd, hot ember in Entreri’s throat.
There’s only a little moonlight by which to see, but Entreri doesn’t let his eyes slip into darkvision. With the door closed, he rests against the wall and tips his head back.
“Damn it,” he mutters, rubbing at the stubble on his jaw.
It’s likely the alcohol—his thoughts are liquid and slippery, and what comes to him, behind his eyelids, are images of Jarlaxle, like a deck of cards being riffled almost too fast to follow. The image he keeps turning over, the wildcard for which he can’t account, is that endless, hungry look.
In Menzoberranzan, there was a question that often came to mind after his conversations with Jarlaxle. He came close to asking it once, but even in his mind it sounded naïve. It’s never seemed so pertinent—or so terribly inadequate—as it does now.
Who are you?
Chapter Text
The morning begins like others before it, though Entreri can’t consider it normal.
It’s still strange to wake up in the guild he left a decade ago, and a city that feels deeply changed. To be called ‘pasha’ by soldiers and attendants, not an outlier but the top of their structure of command. And to be conscious, every minute, that there are drow below his feet and above his head who might decide that today he’s outlived his usefulness.
His time with Jarlaxle together confirmed his fears. Jarlaxle’s restlessness, and the widening scale of his plans. His appetite for control. The awful vision of a tower forced up through half the ward, and the swift fallout that would follow. It’s madness to stay here, with that calamity approaching.
And yet there was an opening; some kind of understanding between them. A few years ago he would have called it ‘leverage’, and dubbed it a failing on Jarlaxle’s part, that his regard for anyone could be used to influence him. Now—if it’s a failing, it’s a mutual one.
He dreamt of Jarlaxle last night. The roof, the wine, the stars.
On the wall, Basadoni’s water-clock chimes. He slips on his gloves and steps out of his office—
“Master?”
—and swears quietly.
In hindsight, it’s obvious that Kimmuriel would have a talent for psychological warfare. The edict burned into Vicente has reduced him to trailing Entreri like a kicked dog in hope of an order. A continual demonstration of Kimmuriel’s dreadful abilities. I could smash his mind like glass, Kimmuriel said; but it seems there’s little left for him to break.
Entreri takes in Vicente's vague, shattered expression. “I have no need of you.” With a single error, he could be ruined in the same way; reduced to a thing with no will of its own.
The voice trails after him. “Yes, master…”
Sunlight is streaming into the training hall. Before he enters, an odd tension coils up in Entreri’s stomach. The memory of last night.
From beside the sunny window, Jarlaxle smiles at him. “Good morning.”
Like honey, that voice. The feeling tightens. He says, “I’m surprised you don't shrivel in the sun.”
“Oh, one adapts, my friend.” Jarlaxle’s hat tilts at a high angle, and there are pale jewels in his ears, and emeralds no larger than water droplets in the elaborate green brocade at the neck of his shirt, shimmering. He looks dashing, and he knows it.
Entreri comes to stand beside him, sharing the view. It’s piercingly quiet, just the two of them in this bright corner.
“Did you sleep well?” Jarlaxle asks.
“No.”
“Whyever not?”
Entreri says, “I think you know why.”
“Ah.” There’s no mockery in Jarlaxle’s face. He’s surprised, and then pleased. “I confess—I’m not sorry in the slightest.”
Tense, exposed, Entreri smiles. “When are you ever.” This thing between them, like an open secret.
“Let’s speak more tonight, hm?” Jarlaxle says softly, and he nods, swallowing the thickness in his throat. “Well, let’s begin.”
As he draws his sword and dagger, he notices three wands on Jarlaxle’s belt, beside the pouch which holds the crystal shard. Light winks across a gold symbol on the pouch, making it appear like an open eye. No stoneskin today: only his instincts against Jarlaxle’s trickery.
Sparring with Jarlaxle is like solving a many-layered puzzle while it tries to gut him. He relishes the challenge of a clever opponent, a worthy opponent; and Jarlaxle is both. But it’s clear, with each bout, that something is different this morning. Jarlaxle’s eyes look glassy, and his parries are ill-timed. He’s distracted.
During a pause, Entreri is stretching tightness out of his arm when he feels the air change. He reacts out of instinct, stepping left—and electricity forks down in a hiss of hot light, missing him by inches.
“What are you—”
Seeing the wand, he rushes Jarlaxle, forcing his opponent to bring up his rapier to defend. It’s a vicious exchange; he harasses Jarlaxle with strike after strike, trying to get inside his inattentive guard. It’s not enough. The next shock thumps the breath from his lungs.
Twitching and gasping, he crashes deliberately into Jarlaxle—heat up his arm, a shallow gash—and drives his swordhilt into Jarlaxle’s sternum. Magic he can’t see takes most of the blow, but Jarlaxle coughs, stumbles, and falls. The wand spins away.
Jarlaxle recovers to one knee, throwing a dagger point-blank at Entreri’s face and kicking at his ankle. Ducking and veering, Entreri brings his sword down in a hard vertical chop. Jarlaxle parries it, teeth bared, and parries the sweep of Entreri’s main-gauche with another dagger that flashes into his hand, then lets it fly.
It doesn’t matter. Jarlaxle can’t recover from this position, not when pressed like this. “Give up,” Entreri says, batting the dagger aside.
Jarlaxle smiles. “Do you think you have me beaten?” His left hand is empty; he hasn’t drawn another weapon.
“I know I do.”
The only warning is a slight black bloom at the corner of Entreri’s eye, and the way the room subtly pulls apart. Then it all runs out like sand.
He is on his knees. He does not remember kneeling.
A figure looms over him, eyes bright and awful in the shadow of that hat. He tries to raise his arms, but they remain slack.
It occurs to him that there is no need to move. It is right that he should be here like this. He wants to be. If only his head did not hurt so badly.
Ah, Artemis. What shall I do with you?
It creeps into him, that voice. Jarlaxle’s hand is close and hot around his jaw, drawing his face up.
He has no answer.
The pain in his skull grows so intense that he can scarcely see. Something is trying to pry him open, like a knife in an oyster. He opens his mouth—it is difficult—and says, “No.”
At once, it ceases. His gut crawls with a sudden awareness of where he is, what he’s doing. What Jarlaxle tried to do.
“Artemis—”
Horror widens Jarlaxle’s eyes, and he flinches his hand away as though burned. The other hand, holding the shard—the shard—falls by Jarlaxle’s side, lax enough that he might drop it.
Entreri finds that he can move. He gets up slowly, breathing through each new sick surge of anger.
As a prisoner in Menzoberranzan, he was forced to do things he found demeaning and abhorrent, but there was always the illusion of choice. At times it seemed worse, that Jarlaxle made him choose, that his agreement was required, however coerced. Now even that pretence has been cast off.
He says, “Is that—what you want from me.”
“No,” Jarlaxle says quickly, face full of shock. “I hadn’t intended to—”
“Is that what you think humans are for. Grovelling and scraping before you.”
“No, of course n—”
“There are thousands of human slaves here. You could buy a hundred for a pittance. A thousand. You wouldn’t need magic to do it.”
This isn’t prudent. He doesn’t care. Every word is white-hot in his mouth.
”I’ve no interest in acquiring slaves, human or otherwise.”
“No, evidently you prefer to make them yourself.”
“I don’t keep slaves.” Jarlaxle has never seemed so near to losing his temper. “Those who work for me, work for me of their own free will, and I pay them well for it. There is no force, no duress—”
“No, merely coercion and pressure you know exactly how to apply. Isn’t that how you convinced me?”
“All this has been mutually beneficial. I knew you’d come around once you’d seen what we could achieve.”
“You knew,” Entreri snarls, “so you decided on my behalf—because giving me a choice would be inconvenient.”
“Not at all, I merely nudged you in the right direction—”
“Do you think we’re animals?”
“Is it ‘we’ now?” Jarlaxle says. “You’ve distanced yourself from other humans for as long as I’ve known you—but now they’re kin?”
“They’re not kin,” Entreri says, because the only person with whom he shares blood is on the other side of a desert, if he’s still alive, and Entreri wants no part of him. “I’m human. This city is full of humans. We’re the same kind. And, crucially, we’re not drow.”
“Do you think that matters?”
“To you? Yes. You’re as bad as Kimmuriel—worse, because you pretend to be otherwise. Answer the question: do you think we’re animals?”
“Of course not.”
“But you consider it acceptable to experiment on us. You’ve been experimenting on me since we met. All this,” he flicks his hand at the hall, “has been one lengthy experiment.” The humiliation of Menzoberranzan is going through him in cold hectic waves.
“In some aspects, yes, but not in others—”
“And after all that, you couldn’t help yourself. Is it a natural instinct you have? To subjugate?”
“No—in fact, I find the prospect quite—”
“You’re disgusting.” It’s the same thing he said to Kimmuriel. He thinks of Vicente’s blank face, a mind empty of all thought except the commands given to him.
I’ll be dead first, he thinks.
“Artemis—”
Idiot, to have thought Jarlaxle was interested in an equal. Jarlaxle will never consider them equal.
He turns his back. “Don’t ask me here again.”
On the landing, he stops to breathe until his pulse is no longer hammering in his ears.
He can still feel the hot impression of Jarlaxle’s hand on his face. Jarlaxle’s thumb was resting on his upper lip, lightly touching his mouth.
He hadn’t considered that Jarlaxle might want something else—more than cooperation, more than an ally. What Jarlaxle meant, when he said that he wanted everything.
There’s no message the next morning; no summons. He trains alone, in an empty tower room.
It’s easier to concentrate without Jarlaxle’s taunts and questions and laughter. Easier to decide his next course of action, clear-headed.
He’s been cautious, too concerned with angering an ally; but the time for delicacy and scruples is past. When the catastrophe comes, he won’t go down with it. The rules of the game are clear: he’ll use Jarlaxle as Jarlaxle has used him.
“What is this place?”
It is the night of the eighteenth, when Vicente Amiral and his unknown Raker contact are due to meet. They have been proceeding through the tunnels beneath the guildhouse for several minutes when Entreri swerves left and hauls up a square iron grate. He is in a bitter, unpredictable mood; Kimmuriel feels it as chaotic noise.
“Down here,” he tells Kimmuriel, which is no satisfactory answer.
Kimmuriel looks down the open shaft. There is a rusted ladder bolted to one wall that appears unsound. He directs Vicente Amiral to climb down, and the human mutely obeys. When the human is standing at the bottom, Kimmuriel steps off the edge. Drifting down, his feet find the floor of a tunnel.
Following behind, Entreri pulls the trapdoor shut, and slips easily down the ladder. His irises are now shining like silver.
“This is known as the Muzad,” Entreri says quietly, “or Calimport Below. A haven for thieves, wererats, escaped slaves, drug smugglers, weapons traders, devil cults, priestesses of Shar, practitioners of illegal magic, and things of that ilk.”
“I see.” There is magic here, in such a concentration that psychic noise is distorted, an uncanny rustle.
“It encompasses the sewers,” Entreri starts to walk, “which I assume you’re familiar with.” Kimmuriel dearly wishes he were not. “But it extends much deeper. Some of it is only accessible with the right keys or objects, and other parts only by invitation.”
They descend a rough staircase, and turn into a narrow passage. Entreri seems to navigate this place with ease, and Kimmuriel orders Vicente to follow. “How do you propose that we proceed?”
“The only thing I need to ascertain is if the poisoning was ordered by Pasha Wroning.” At Kimmuriel’s look, Entreri adds, “The head of the Rakers’ Guild. If it was, Vicente should simply give his report and leave. We let the Raker go, rather than alert them that anything’s amiss.”
“Jarlaxle will not be pleased with that.”
The shape of Entreri’s mind hardens. “Jarlaxle will have to accept it as preferable to beginning a war we’re not prepared to fight.”
“And if the Raker has acted alone?”
“Then he can interrogate her to his heart’s content.”
Kimmuriel cannot stop to interrogate that curious hostility, not when he is trying to concentrate on each turn of their path. “We should anticipate an ambush.”
“Obviously,” Entreri says. “And you’ll spring it immediately if you’re seen.”
“I do not intend to be seen.”
The walls narrow, the darkness thickens, and soon they descend a cramped stairwell to a gate. Entreri examines the lock. From his belt, he takes a length of fine chain strung with metal implements. Thieves’ tools, which he puts to use with practiced efficiency. He does not trouble to remove his gloves, and yet he works quicker than could any Bregan D’aerthe operative, his fingers nearly a blur.
“An apprentice scout would work faster than this,” Kimmuriel murmurs, for no reason but to needle this jumped-up creature.
“I doubt that. And an apprentice scout wouldn’t have the first notion of how to navigate this place, or what to look for.”
Around the corner, they look into a cavernous room. Narrow iron grating runs the full extent of the room, partly ringed by iron railings, and leads to another gate, another staircase. A parallel platform spans the other side, with a narrow bridge between them. Water gushes through a deep channel below. It looks foul, its surface greasy and foaming as it swirls down to a sluice.
This is the place, Entreri signs in clumsy drow cant.
Kimmuriel wrinkles his nose. Truly, this city conceals its greatest delights.
The Rakers aren’t a large guild, though what they lack in numbers they make up for in clout, with many powerful allies. Some of the guild’s leaders are known to Entreri; but much has changed in the years of his absence.
From his hiding-place, he sees a figure descending the stairs at the other end of the iron deck. She’s cloaked, her face hidden. A few inches over five feet, she looks lean and limber, likely quick in a fight. By the way she walks, she has a blade at each hip, at least.
Vicente stands on the bridge in the middle of the room. At the foot of the stairs, she addresses him. “Amiral.”
No reply.
“Well, you kept this appointment, but that’s all you’ve managed.” She approaches him in swift, silent strides. “Is he here?”
“No,” Vicente says, with Kimmuriel his ventriloquist.
“Does he know about you? About this deal?”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
Entreri lets his lips curve humourlessly. Even now, Kimmuriel’s trying to provoke him.
“Is that right.” The woman scrutinises Vicente. “But you proceeded as we arranged?”
“Yes.”
“Gods.” She’s frustrated, but her posture remains strict and ready. “I wish I could say I expected more, but I didn’t.” There’s something in her voice and posture, some quality of stillness and reserve. This isn’t a third-rate killer, some mouthy guild-rat with a stolen sword and a grossly inflated sense of her own prowess.
Vicente says, “What will you tell your master?”
Entreri can hear tinges of Kimmuriel’s accented Common.
“Nothing, of course. Why would I report failure?”
“Would they not wish to know what you are doing about Entreri?”
Under her cowl, her eyes narrow. “Gods, you really are craven, aren’t you? He’s got you all running scared.”
“No. I meant that—”
“None of this is useful to me, do you understand? And Wroning and his lieutenants are still playing at appeasement, when they should be smashing your guild apart.”
She advances on Vicente, calmly and with the surety of a predator moving on cornered prey; and Entreri realises that he’s looking at another assassin. He would bet every coin to his name on it. And while he doesn’t have enough information to know whether she’s acting alone, evidently it’s time to do away with intermediaries.
What are you doing? Kimmuriel, like a hiss in his ear. He ignores it, rising out of concealment and onto the wet deck.
The woman turns. Just before she draws back her cowl, he sees the slice of her smile.
It’s a thin, aquiline face. Black, short-cropped hair, eyebrows like bold calligraphic strokes. Her grey skin would be as brown as his in daylight. She can’t be older than twenty.
There’s nothing remarkable about her, except that her features are difficult to fix upon: she’s slippery, mutable; he almost expects her to change as he looks at her.
“Entreri,” she says, and her voice is different, low and strong with satisfaction.
Few guilds train assassins as he was trained. It’s costly and time-consuming, and it requires expert tutors and a rare candidate. Most children die learning the trade—and those that survive to complete it become singularly dangerous, even to their own benefactors. These days pashas deem it easier and safer to train only soldiers and thieves, and give the difficult work to those who rise naturally to the top of the heap. Entreri hasn’t met another person trained in the art for years. Certainly not one so young.
“I hope I was expected,” he says. “Given the sloppiness of your planning.”
Her hand comes up suddenly, and he sees metal flash from her fist. He braces himself, but her target—signalled briefly by her eyes—is Vicente. Entreri turns his head a fraction, keeping her square in his view.
Vicente’s face is rigid, a stiletto stuck halfway into his forehead. His legs fold, with almost exaggerated slowness, and he collapses.
“What did you do to him?” she says, lifting her chin. “He seemed different.” She shrugs. “I suppose it’s irrelevant now.”
Kimmuriel, annoyed, breaks into his thoughts. This is not what we discussed.
Things change, Entreri replies. Stay out of sight.
Aloud, he says, “I take it all this ridiculous theatre was meant to draw me onto your turf.”
“I could have got into your guildhouse,” the woman says. Doubtful. “But Amiral wanted you cast out, which suited me. Draw you out with the breadcrumb trail—gods, he was so clumsy—or have you shoved out. I’m pleased it went like this, I prefer it this way.”
There’s another dagger in her hand now, and she flips it over and over again. She’s trying to impress him.
“Do you have a name.”
“Kitar.” An Old Alzhedo word—knife. He can almost hear Basadoni’s remark: how obvious. “Not that it’ll do much good to tell you now, but—”
“I’m surprised your pasha lets you out for unsanctioned missions. I’m sure he keeps you on a tight leash.” As Basadoni did him in those early years.
“My pasha is busy trying to put off the inevitable. Everyone knew there’d be war as soon as you got rid of Basadoni—whatever you did to him. There should be war. And it suits my interests to dispose of you.”
“So it has nothing to do with personal glory,” Entreri says, sarcastically.
“It does,” she says. “All I’ve heard for years is your name—oh, the endless comparisons, the speculation about whether I could possibly measure up to the greatest assassin the south has ever produced, on and on…”
“How tedious.”
“I’m not going to be considered second-rate to you. And all I need is one fight to prove it.”
Entreri almost winces, struck by memory: Drizzt, shaking in rage, his scimitar drawing a bloody line on Entreri’s neck. So what have we proven?
He shakes his head at the laughable uselessness of it all. “Why does it matter.”
“Because it’s true,” she says. “Besides, reputation is everything here, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Those things have little to do with each other. How many reputations do you think are deserved?”
“Are you a lie, then?”
“I might be.”
“No,” she says, but he’s disarmed her, “no, I know you’re not, I know about you—”
“You know what you’ve heard. There’s plenty of hysteria and sensationalism about our line of work—would you consider the ordinary populace a reliable source of information about your own exploits? I’m sure they consider you as much of a demonic creature as they do me.”
She sneers. “One of the other lieutenants hangs rue over his door.” An old Calishite folk practice, to ward off devils. “It’s absurd.”
“Your profession is death. It shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“They owe me more respect than that.”
“Respect.” He gives a little chuckle. “Most of them won’t consider you worthier than the filth on their shoes. They’ll fear you, but they won’t respect you.”
No cocky answer to that. The stillness has given way—as he’d known it would—to a nervy anger. There’s nothing more volatile than a young assassin.
“I’m curious,” Entreri says. “Whether you believe it was all worth it. Your guild has no tradition for training assassins—I’m sure they were quite unkind.”
“Of course it was worth it.”
“Was it? The drudgery, day after day. The isolation. The constant injuries and frequent beatings, because children saturated with violence are uniquely suggestible. Did you think it would be glorious, this life? Were you disappointed to learn that it’s tedious, and foul, and entirely hollow? Do you enjoy the vanity and cruelty and desperation you have to observe? The useless trivia you learn about arrogant, gutless men? The way they sound when they plead?”
She grimaces. “I choose my work. I’m well-paid. And I have the esteem of my guild—”
“Esteem.” Laughable. Young assassins are chattel. “Tell me, how many years of exclusive service did you promise them?”
Her jaw moves, her teeth sliding across each other. “Ten.”
Evidently the Rakers would only commit to training an assassin with some assurance of a return on their investment. He himself was indentured to Basadoni for five years.
“Did they offer you time off your contract for killing me.”
Her look speaks a volume. The Rakers didn’t order any such move against him. She’s undertaken this crusade alone; and no one will know what befell her.
He should signal to Kimmuriel, but he doesn’t. Against all reason, he doesn’t want to see her dead.
“A sword can’t wield itself,” he says. “You’ll always be someone’s instrument.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll dispose of him next—Wroning, he won’t be—”
“And then you’ll belong to his successor. You’re indebted to the guild. They’ll make sure they get what they’re owed.”
“Maybe so,” she says. “But after that I’ll be free.”
“Hardly,” he says. “How many people have you killed?”
“Twenty-two. You’ll be the twenty-third.”
“I assure you, it won’t be any more satisfying after a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred. Killing me won’t make it all worth it.”
“No,” she says, “no, maybe it won’t.” She takes an idle step toward him, and the muscles in his arm twitch with readiness.
Then she smiles, thinly, horribly. “I’ve really looked forward to this,” she says. “I hardly look forward to anything. You’re right, there’s so much tedium—the waiting, and the long nights, hiding in cupboards to watch a sabbalad hit a servant for serving wine warm, or a noble fucking his mistress… And I hate the way they look at me, as if I could feel sorry for them after they’ve whined and wept and pissed themselves…”
“But—I think,” she gives a little laugh, “I think I’ll like killing you. I hope it’s really something.”
“It won’t be,” he says. “It’ll be as empty as all the rest. But you’re not going to kill me.”
“You’ll see,” she says. And she raises her hand.
Kimmuriel did not see the sigils on the floor, but now they glow bright white, and the detonation spreads out like an astral wave, a brutal smear of colour. Distracted by the humans, he is slow to react, and the magic breaks over him before he can defend against it. His hearing rises in a whine, and he sags against the wall, dazed.
Presently, he hears the water gushing below. The echo of Entreri’s voice: “Of course.” His own startled breathing. Nothing else. The two other minds in the chamber are mute to him.
An anti-magic field.
He can consider himself superior to mages and clerics, who rely on an external source for their capability. But infrequently—and unpleasantly—he is reminded that his power is still a kind of magic, and might be disrupted by force. He can make the internal motions, but he cannot feel the slightest energetic excitation. It is as though a region of himself has gone utterly dark.
A chill breaks out over his chest and shoulders, yet he is sweating. He is no longer invisible—he can see his own hands, which are trembling. The field of exclusion seems to cover the entire room and beyond, and if he moves he will be discovered.
Kimmuriel!
He is standing in his workroom, in the rooms he was given as a child. A book lies on the floor, tipped over and bent, and Jarlaxle is speaking his name. Elsewhere, the screaming has begun.
He blinks.
The speed with which Entreri moves is ferocious, and this verifies that there is no magic to it. Both humans have drawn blades, and it is a clanging, scraping blur of metal they make, loud even over the noise of the water. The woman is grinning, so wide it makes Kimmuriel’s jaw ache to see it.
In his current position he is hidden by a large contraption, a pump of some kind. He should retreat, but he cannot risk being noticed; and either of these armed humans would be glad to take advantage of his state. Thus he remains where he is, folding his hands tightly, and watches.
The fight is accelerating. The woman seems intent upon a quick victory; she hounds Entreri, her movements growing wild. The next driving arc of her broad blade clangs terribly, as though she is trying to shatter his sword. He retreats, and she makes an opportunistic lunge with the other. But he is waiting for her: a quick side-to-side parry and a quicker stab to her exposed side.
Kimmuriel does not hear her cry out; she lurches, and Entreri smashes her head against the iron railing, and kicks her down into the water.
It is not deep, only waist high. The woman surfaces with a yell of frustration and clambers out, vaulting over the rail onto the platform.
Ready for her, Entreri parries the slicing sweeps of her swords, water misting upon them. He seems able to predict her, forcing her back and back. His face shows only a fierce calm, and each movement is commanding and intelligent.
Kimmuriel hears him say, “Do you have something against magic?”
“I wanted a fair fight,” the woman replies.
Entreri laughs in her face. “There’s no such thing.”
Her next thrust is met with a plangent parry. His counter forces her sword at an angle, too close to her body, their blades grinding horribly. With a flick of his dagger he slices her wrist, and she gives a low, gritted scream. He elbows her in the throat and shoves her over the edge and down into the water once more.
The river is deeper there, the churning more powerful. One of her blades flows down and clangs against the sluice gate. She tries to heave herself out, spluttering up filthy water and scrabbling at the grating. Entreri kicks the blade out of her right hand and hauls her up by the neck of her sopping cloak.
“Know when you’re beaten,” he growls.
“No!”
Entreri slams her flat on the ground, and yanks her arms behind her back. Even now she is struggling and squirming, attempting to free herself; but he simply pins her down with his weight. Freeing his other hand, he takes her by the neck and grinds her face into the filthy floor.
Kimmuriel’s skin feels hot and supple, like glass being blown into an unwonted shape. He becomes aware of the dull, deep throbbing between his legs. Not this, not now—
When he looks again, the woman has gone limp, her back shuddering with her breaths. Tying her wrists, Entreri says:
“You’re inexperienced, and foolhardy, but your technique and reflexes are good, and you’re clever. I could have taught you plenty. That is what assassins do—we pass on skills which cannot be taught by those with no experience of the craft itself. When we don’t view each other as enemies, we can be useful to each other.”
She kicks out at him. Calmly, he catches her leg by the calf and pins it with his knee, and goes on working.
“But you pursued this pointless crusade against me and my guild, and you failed. So instead I am taking you to my employer, who is going to kill you.”
She gives a grim, wheezing laugh. “You’re not going to do it yourself?”
“No, I’m not. As I told you, you’ll always be someone’s instrument.”
“But Basadoni’s dead.”
“He is.” Entreri tugs hard on her bonds, testing the knots, and says, “Good enough.”
He drags her to her feet, shaking her hard as she struggles, and says loudly to the room, “You can stop hiding now.” He pushes her through the gate and starts back down the tunnel.
Kimmuriel, however, trails them at a safe distance, barely glancing at the corpse of Vicente Amiral. He steps out of the deadening field and the world floods back in all its resonance. He has to pause to steady himself, trying not to sway as if liquor-addled. He feels sick with relief and adrenaline.
That was rash, he hurls at Entreri, when he has closed the distance between them, wrapped with invisibility once more.
I notice you chose not to intervene, comes the reply, and a surge of angry energy rises in Kimmuriel. His power feels twitchy and reactive for having been brutally suppressed.
You insisted that this was your affair.
That hasn’t restrained you before now. Something to do with the dispelling field, perhaps?
That is no inconvenience to me.
Coiling, blackish amusement, but Entreri is distracted by their captive. Really.
As they near the tunnels beneath the guild, the woman begins to struggle in earnest. Entreri put the tip of his dagger to her nape and snarls, “You can arrive hale and in one piece, or full of punctures. It’s all the same to me.”
With that, Kimmuriel plunges into her mind and seizes her muscles like a fistful of strings. Her thoughts thrash with outrage and panic, but he simply smothers them and forces her to walk.
Come, iblith, he tells Entreri. Let us conclude this.
Chapter 9
Notes:
In keeping with the sourcebooks, I made Alzhedo a prestige language.
Chapter Text
“So this is she,” Jarlaxle says in Common. “Our mastermind.”
It’s almost midnight. Up in the pasha’s receiving room, Jarlaxle settles in a high-backed chair, and smiles as Kimmuriel drives their prisoner down to her knees before him. Entreri’s throat tightens.
He wants to speak to her further. He wants to kill her quickly and throw her body into the sewer. He wants to untie her and tell her to flee. Instead, he’s going to watch the drow play with their prey. He’s walked into a nightmare: the blood-warm air, the hellish red brazier-light, and the doomed, kneeling figure.
Jarlaxle props his elbow on the scrolled arm of his chair. “Let her go, Kimmuriel. She’s no threat to me.”
The woman—Kitar—blinks and swallows, trying to compose herself. Her shoulders are drawn up; she’s shaking, but also subtly wringing at her bonds. She looks only at Jarlaxle.
“Master.” She bows as well as she’s able.
“This isn’t a soldier,” Jarlaxle muses. “Do the Rakers appoint lieutenants so young?”
Horror droning in his ears, Entreri says, “She’s an assassin.”
“I wasn’t aware that the Rakers trained assassins.”
“Times change.”
“I can be useful,” Kitar says quickly, her voice strong and earnest—believe me, it says, believe me. “Useful to you. Let’s make a deal.”
Jarlaxle’s smile tucks into his cheek. “Oh, she’s very good.” He addresses Entreri. “Any accomplices within her guild?”
“No. Pasha Wroning and the rest of the Rakers are unaware of her activities.”
“And what about within our guild?”
“She dealt with him herself.”
“But there are more,” Jarlaxle says, and then he looks down at the prisoner. “Aren’t there?”
Kitar nods. “I’ve got other accomplices in your guild. Spare me and I’ll name them.”
“You’ll name them, regardless,” Jarlaxle says mildly. “I see no reason to keep you alive.”
“She might be useful,” Entreri says. “If your aim is to undermine the Rakers’ control of this ward, or other wards, she’ll be able to give you more than most.”
“But that requires keeping a poisonous creature in our dungeons. A risk, no?”
“Perhaps.”
Jarlaxle rises from his chair and walks to the window. Half a minute passes in silence: he looks out, pensive, and touches the pouch at his hip. Entreri imagines he can almost hear the damn thing hiss.
“I won’t have it, you see,” Jarlaxle says abruptly. He paces back toward Kitar. “I won’t have you interfering with what I’ve planned.”
She starts to reply. “I wouldn’t—”
He can’t hear her. “You’re nothing to me, nothing at all. I won’t remember you after this evening.” He treads a circle around her. “But I do want you to know that your efforts were nothing more than a trivial irritation—and that it costs me nothing to erase you completely.”
With that, a change comes over Kitar. Her eyes look like black glass in her head. She knows she’s going to die.
She turns her face toward Entreri. “Why did you do this.” She’s speaking in Alzhedo; like him, she’s been taught to feign belonging among aristocrats as well as soldiers and thieves. “Why them?”
Entreri sees Jarlaxle frown. The drow will suspect conspiracy; he doesn’t care. In that same language, he replies, “Because I couldn’t refuse.” More and more, he thinks he should have.
“Did you mean it? About teaching me?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell them not to kill me.”
“It isn’t my decision.”
Kimmuriel steps forward. “Shall I?”
“No need,” Jarlaxle replies. His hand was raised to his ear; now it falls to his hip. “I have my own means.” He slides out the shard from its pouch. Kitar stiffens, confused by the sight of it.
Entreri has never seen Jarlaxle conduct an interrogation; he’d rather achieve the same by charm, negotiation, and leverage. Now Jarlaxle resorts to chanting questions about the Rakers, their strongholds, and their numbers, while the shard tries to drag the information out by force. If he’s decided to leave Kitar’s will intact, it’s no kindness: she grunts and screams and struggles, a slug of blood sliding out of her nose, and spits such vile curses that it seems the floor will open up beneath them.
Entreri feels remote from it all, as if watching it through fogged glass. The minutes crawl by. Jarlaxle’s demeanour only darkens, the shard held very tight in his fist. It isn’t working.
“Let me,” Kimmuriel offers quietly.
“No,” Jarlaxle says, shaking his head. He blinks, and looks troubled. “No—enough.” He slips the shard away.
Kitar spits up blood onto the floor. “You’ll get more from her if you secure her cooperation,” Entreri says.
“I’ve no need of another assassin,” Jarlaxle says. “And she erred very greatly in targeting you.”
Traitorously, Entreri’s stomach twists.
With a glance at Kimmuriel, Jarlaxle says, “Do it.”
Kimmuriel breathes in and out, and a faint line appears between his eyebrows. Kitar lolls forward, and slumps to the floor. Her eyes stare at nothing.
Entreri says, “I’ll have my people remove the body.” His voice sounds strange to his own ears. “And we can consider this resolved.”
“No, I don’t believe so,” Jarlaxle says. “After all, they must know the cost of acting against us.”
“She acted alone.”
“So she claims—but it hardly matters. They’re complacent, or they’re preparing to move against us. Either way, I wish to deal with them now, and conclusively.”
Entreri presses his tongue to his palate and lets his breath go silently. “Execute every Raker,” he says. “Hundreds of them—because they’re inconvenient.”
“Because they’re insignificant,” Jarlaxle replies. “And it will be nothing to simply remove them.”
Days ago Entreri would have argued. But this isn’t the same ally he agreed to follow; and the danger is very real and present, with Kitar’s body on the flagstones before him. Calm grips him like a thing with claws, and he bites his tongue.
Instead, Kimmuriel speaks up. “I would advise strongly against this. It is not—”
“And I take your counsel under advisement,” Jarlaxle says, smoothly drowning him out, “but you are overruled. I want them wiped out. Their stronghold, all their safehouses and warehouses—every lieutenant, every soldier, every spy. Begin the preparations now.”
The planning goes on for hours. When at last they are dismissed, Kimmuriel descends to his chambers for a bath. It does nothing to quell his agitation, but at least he can no longer smell the sewers on himself. Then he paces his workroom, turning his broken psicrystal over in his hand.
Tomorrow night, Jarlaxle is sending them to war. If it goes as Kimmuriel fears, it will be a flag waved from a parapet and they will come: human armies, human weapons, human mages—in overwhelming numbers.
It must be the shard. They have no allies to call upon, no leverage by which to protect themselves from the fallout. Either the shard is capable of astonishing feats, or it has deceived Jarlaxle beyond all reason and restraint. In either case they are proceeding blind, and Jarlaxle is content for them to believe that he values their lives at a pittance. He has told Kimmuriel nothing—nothing, when once they laid careful plans together.
The safest course of action would be to flee, but that bears its own risk. Jarlaxle despises deserters: he has thrown men from the company for such an offence.
If Kimmuriel is to stay—if he is to survive—he needs information.
In House Oblodra, in a room far underground, there was an adamantine tank with a heavy, airtight cover. It could be filled brimful with water using a pump which drew from a lake below. Kimmuriel knew of it before he was brought to it; the test was notorious.
Panic is not useful, Kimmuriel, Izyr told him, after he was hauled out of the tank the first time, retching up water, shaking and exhausted from thrashing and pounding on the ceiling. On the third occasion he drowned and was fetched back from oblivion. On the fourth he psychoported involuntarily through the tank’s wall and was punished for it. On the fifth, numb with fear, his lungs screaming, he gathered all the energy he had and willed himself to breathe. Pain sliced into his neck, and where it stung he found strange delicate frills of tissue, beating with each gulp of water they took up: gills. He drifted in the tank for an hour, feeling quite serene, and came round as he was being carried to the infirmary, too drained even to lift his head.
Any environment or circumstance can be survived, if one adapts to it. That was the lesson his family taught him, albeit inadvertently.
He puts down the inert psicrystal and rubs his hands over his face. His power is fizzing along his nerves, making his temples throb. He can hardly keep still.
There is little time. He must think.
Entreri did not speak against Jarlaxle. He acquiesced to everything as it was outlined, even offered up what he had learned of the Rakers’ locations; and then, inexplicably, Jarlaxle excluded him from the operation, stating that he had other uses for him. Entreri must know about the shard and its capabilities. He must know if Jarlaxle has aligned with allies that make this act of provocation logical and profitable, or if the shard is leading them unto ruin.
Kimmuriel lingers near the door, torn. He will be disobeying a command from Jarlaxle. He will be giving Entreri license to attack him. But if Entreri knows something, he must have it.
You’re shorter on time than even you know, Jarlaxle told him, a tenday before House Oblodra fell. This time he fears there will not even be a warning.
Chilled with a bucket of ice, the bath washes off some things but not others. Entreri thinks of nothing, strangely, until he’s dressing in his bedchamber, and hears wings beating overhead.
It reminds him of Dwahvel’s sparrows. She uses them to send messages, from a sparrow loft on top of the Copper Ante. He hears them everywhere, chirruping from eaves and orange trees. Tendays ago, he wouldn’t have noticed them at all.
Perhaps he can tell her something—tell her enough. His only other ally is being slowly changed before his eyes; and he believes, wisely or not, that Dwahvel might yet help him.
He takes up his belt, and stops. It’s quiet; but some instinct makes him reach for a blade.
Even as he does, a shape comes through the wall. He straightens, sword ready at his side. The grey, billowing thing coalesces into a body.
Kimmuriel wears a different robe than when they descended into the sewers, dark blue or black, a glint of gold stitching along the sleeves. His thick braid looks hastily done, and there’s tension in his mask-like face.
“Are you lost,” Entreri says in Drow. “Get out.”
“Put that away.” It’s easy to forget the force of Kimmuriel’s presence; it’s not charisma, exactly, but something adjacent to it.
“No. Why are you here.”
Kimmuriel frowns. In Entreri’s hand the sword hilt trembles and grows warm, and warmer; now it’s scorching, searing his flesh. He clamps his teeth against it, glaring at Kimmuriel, but the futility is obvious to them both. His stinging hand opens, and the sword clatters onto the floor.
No look of satisfaction. Kimmuriel is sharply focused. “You said nothing. Why?”
Finally, one of Jarlaxle’s lackeys has thought to worry about the shard.
“Because there was nothing to say.”
“Nothing to say—” Kimmuriel’s mouth is the most mobile part of his face, and confesses anger before it’s allowed into his eyes. “I am meant to believe that you have no views whatsoever on the matter.”
“Believe what you will,” Entreri says. ”Last chance. Get out of my rooms.”
Kimmuriel gives a short, cold laugh. ”I assure you—you cannot keep me out of anywhere I wish to go.”
As Entreri lunges, Kimmuriel pours out an energetic wave which hardens into a wall. The human slams into it and staggers back, dazed.
Too slow, he taunts. It would have gone easier for you if you had simply obeyed.
Falling into a ready stance, Entreri says, “This won’t go easy for you at all.” Even out of his armour, barefoot, with his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, he has an air of threat. For a moment Kimmuriel reassesses—this is a far more resilient target than Vicente, and hardier still than Kitar—but his gamble cannot be rescinded now.
Entreri’s mind tosses and writhes, trying to force him out. It cannot do him any true harm; but the webbed structure warps with sheer hostility, tangling around him like a bright net.
Voices chatter and shout, a confusion of languages. Metal scrapes across metal, coins ring in a pocket, a whip cracks. Scenes flicker into being—dark, sunlit, a plain bedchamber and the smell of citrus, the pasha’s study, the old guildmaster lying in bed, gulls screaming in a blazing blue sky, a human corpse on a marble floor, a halfling with curled hair and folded arms, Kitar on her knees—
And everywhere, drow: Do’Urden shinning up a cavern wall, Do’Urden hunched over with blood on his face, Rai’gy scowling from across a room, soldiers smoking outside a Stenchstreets tavern, Jarlaxle in sunlight with his rapier high, Jarlaxle looking across a city square, Jarlaxle on a rooftop with the moon at his shoulder, Jarlaxle cupping a heavy red flowerhead in his hand—
—not keep slaves!
Jarlaxle’s voice, raised in anger.
Farther down, his surroundings begin to thrash. Kimmuriel sinks through memories of Menzoberranzan, and scalding, endless desert, and a cliff in the dark, all of them sour and burned out as though treated with acid.
Jarlaxle takes coin from a smiling priestess. Iron manacles clank around his wrists. He scrubs Drizzt’s blood out of the beds of his fingernails.
Guilty conscience?
Fuck you.
The strands clot and deform, as if something has dragged through them and pulled the structure apart. The things here are broken, inchoate: dreams, scraps of memory, grim detritus. And there is so much of it, such a pit of writhing, awful things which seems to extend forever. It sucks at him with an enervating cold he can feel in his body.
Time is relative in the mind; he does not know how long he has been down here. Minutes, hours—
His mouth is covered by a thick, sweaty hand (no). A man (leave) sits blank-faced in an alley beside another body. Spiders crawl across a pitted stone floor (too close i).
No—damn you, get out—
Entreri’s rage batters at him. Beneath it is cold vaporous fear, creeping.
What is it you do not want me to find?
A whip lashes at his hand. Flecks of green light refract upon Jarlaxle’s cheek—the shard. Kimmuriel seizes on that image, but it is clawed away from him. More gnashing of voices.
There is a white marble floor, and something lying on it. A drow with red eyes, the features illegible. Entreri’s hands are trying to restrain it, but the body keeps melting and flowing away, twisting out of his grasp like silk ribbons. The dream feels heavy and ripe; it has a current through it which makes Kimmuriel’s throat heat. It must be Jarlaxle—of course he would be the object of this human’s guilty, squalid fantasies.
How pitiful you are, he tells Entreri. Is this what you want of him?
Stop it—
Does he know that you dream of him? Does he—
There is a sweep of white around the creature’s head. Long hair, incongruous with—
It is not Jarlaxle.
The strand is snarled up with others into a thick, dark, beating knot. Kimmuriel pulls, and it resists him; he pulls, and pulls, straining, and it comes loose, every strand pulsing like a vein. Queasy, furious, he reaches for them.
More dreams—all with the same heavy texture, lush and tense. This hypnic figure of himself is both drow and something amorphous like an astral phane, and magic churns around him. His face is disappearing by increments; and then he is threateningly close, trying to sink long fingers into Entreri’s forehead.
They are in a hot place. Entreri can see only his eyes clearly. The Kimmuriel in the dream shivers, body and robe one mingling wave, but Entreri catches him by the wrist to keep him in place. His colouring has become lurid: his mouth is very red, and his teeth are sharp and white, and his face is a perfect darkness.
Entreri, despising him, leans over and begins to peel away his robe.
His lungs pull tight. He does not know what is about to happen; but in another sense he knows quite well. As he struggles free of the murk, the dream shreds itself. His panic is already turning into something else.
He is not naive about sex. At the age of twenty he knew which members of the House guard wished to bend him over his worktable, what his matron did to her consorts, and the nature of his brother Hazaufein’s taste for pain. The very notion of physical congress has always been disgusting—that revolting slop of sensation; all that slick, filthy writhing and grunting. Disgust fills him now, as he stares at Entreri.
You repugnant creature, how dare you—
Too late, he realises that the barrier between them is no longer there.
In an eye-blink Entreri is across the floor, and his hand slams upon the wall behind Kimmuriel’s head. Kimmuriel does not startle, shoulders braced with the effort. If he moves they will touch—so he does not move.
“Be very careful.” Entreri’s breath is hot upon his cheek.
“I think we are past idle threats.”
“I assure you, I’ve never made an idle threat. I’d be within my rights to kill you.”
“But you will not—because he would skin you alive.” Kimmuriel tips up his face. “Another impasse, I believe.”
He can feel Entreri’s shame, which reeks like boiling fat amid a fog of confusion and denial. Entreri is turning it over and over in his mind, doubting it, arguing with it, hating it. It cannot be: Entreri thinks him petty and revolting, and yearns for the day when Jarlaxle does not stand in the way of killing him.
“Do you know that it is taboo among my people? We liken it to lying with an animal—”
“I no longer believe there are things your people won’t do.”
“You are beneath me.”
“Am I,” Entreri murmurs, very low, and he feels a sickening pulse between his legs. “Why, then, are you rooting around in my head?”
The human is so close—Kimmuriel can feel how warm he is; can smell the dampness of his hair and something faintly camphorous about his skin. He wonders how Entreri’s mouth would feel on his own skin, anticipation sliding up his spine, and wants to bite through his tongue.
This reaction is inexplicable. He does not want to touch Entreri. He does not want to be touched by Entreri.
“Your depravities do not interest me,” he says stiffly. “The only thing of interest about you is Jarlaxle. You have spent more time with him than anyone in recent days. Why is he doing this?”
“Why does he do anything—a myriad reasons, I’m sure.”
“That is not an answer.”
“I don’t have an answer,” Entreri says. “Certainly none I’d give you.” There is a blade in his sleeve. Each time he thinks of it, the muscles in his left arm twitch minutely in anticipation. If he reaches for it, Kimmuriel will make him regret it.
“Tell me.”
“Do you truly believe Jarlaxle has confided anything in me. Do you know him at all—”
“I know that you have been together a great deal. I know that—for reasons beyond all explication—he considers you in some way special, and therefore he—”
“That doesn’t mean what you think it does.”
There—a thing goes darkly across the surface of Entreri’s mind, and it is tangibly Jarlaxle, it has the same quality of allure and obscurity as Jarlaxle himself.
Artemis—
Their positions are wrong: Entreri is not where he should be, and Jarlaxle is not what he should be; he is something else. The memory is dark and tilted, out of joint; Kimmuriel cannot understand it, but he is struck, again, by the suspicion that Entreri knows much more than he is admitting.
“Enough,” he hisses. “You are trying my patience—”
Entreri’s eyes have gone darker still, and his mind clouds like an alembic full of vapour. “I told you to get out of my head—”
“Not until I have what I require.”
Enraged, Entreri thinks of the blade again, and the impulse sparks into his arm and hand. Kimmuriel intercepts him halfway to the weapon, pushing tiny jolts of energy along the nerves which paralyse him from the elbow down.
In the face of Entreri’s helplessness, he smiles. It feels animalistic. “You are pathetic—”
With the other hand, Entreri grabs him by the throat.
There’s no warning. For the first moments that he’s submerged, he does nothing but endure the inside of Kimmuriel’s mind.
Years ago he killed Cevdet el Ozbek, third cousin to the caleph, and took from the body a crystal so enchanted that it trembled in his hand. He thinks of it as Kimmuriel’s mind vibrates around him, an impossible maelstrom of energy and noise. In his confused perception, it’s like being deafened by bright light.
Thoughts pour at him, incomprehensible. At the core of it all he has a sense of Kimmuriel, straining to wrest it under control. Kimmuriel, who has never allowed another person inside him like this and is horrified, and drowning them both in it.
In the dark bedchamber Kimmuriel has gone stiff. Entreri can feel every motion of his throat, straining to draw in air. Remove your hand—
First, get out of my head.
Remove your hand!
The interference is clumsier than before. Entreri’s arm gives a strange, faint spasm, and the tendons in his hand prickle, suddenly weak.
He redoubles his grip, pushing Kimmuriel’s head against the wall. As he begins to squeeze, he hisses, “I will break your neck—”
Kimmuriel pants, his pulse shallow against Entreri’s index finger. His jaw is so clenched that Entreri can see the indentation near his ear. The vibrations are under their feet now; there’s rumbling, rattling noise from all around. Entreri glances over his shoulder: the room is shaking. They are the only things motionless.
It’s almost like looking into a mirror, except the image is distorted, glowing cracks veining through it. In Kimmuriel’s thoughts he looks exotic, with his brown, pale skin and colourless eyes, and a shadow around his jaw. His face is sharp where a human’s should be round and flat, clever where it should be dull; centred in himself. He’s built like a drow but a little bulkier, and to Kimmuriel there’s something coarse—animal—about his broader shoulders and chest and thighs, incongruous with the subtle way he moves. And he’s quiet, which is an annoyance and an aberration, that his mind is only a mutter where others are a shout.
Something is moving in that ferment. It’s not a memory, and it’s more vivid than a dream, the colours so strong that they almost congeal on his tongue. It feels guilty.
An apparition of Entreri is bending over him, grey-shaded. They’re in darkness, in the sewer—echoes, dripping water—and he’s pinned down, his hands bound. His wrists are rope-raw, but he isn’t struggling now. His brain feels wild and incandescent.
Then the lower folds of his robe are pushed up around his waist, and gloved hands smooth over his hips. His legs are tugged apart; he can feel the easy, terrible strength of the man behind him. His head sinks, the satiny weight of his braid against his shoulder.
He breathes through his mouth, and he wants—Kimmuriel wants—
“You hypocrite.”
All of it goes through him in an instant; then it’s yanked away. On the nightstand, something shatters. He barely hears it—the noise has risen to a roar and he’s being pulled apart, shoved and wrung and buffeted by furious waves. With thunderous force, he’s ripped out of Kimmuriel’s mind.
Pain bursts into his skull. He gags, seeing a slurry of colour, and sinks to a crouch rather than lose his footing. Before he fully recovers, he stumbles up.
In the hot darkness Kimmuriel has sagged, holding himself up with a hard-knuckled grip on a chair. Entreri can see his eyes: drooped, feral.
It settles into him then, this appalling thing between them.
“Leave,” he says. “Now.”
“He is going to see us all killed.” Kimmuriel’s voice is barely a voice. “That includes you.”
“Out.”
“Do you have no objections? Are you so stupid as to—”
“I had plenty of objections,” Entreri snaps. “Why do you think he cut me out of his plans?”
Kimmuriel straightens, pushing all the hair spilling out of his braid back from his face. “Tell me what will happen if we destroy that guild.”
It’s absurd for them to be conversing like this. Given what has just transpired, he should be putting a blade through Kimmuriel and reporting to Jarlaxle that it was self-defence. But an opportunity has presented itself, and his mind is already working. Something might yet be salvaged from all this mess.
He says, “You already know that.”
“Retribution,” comes the answer.
“And their allies are far greater in number than we are.”
“Why would they become involved? It is no concern of theirs.”
“This isn’t Menzoberranzan. Other parties won’t simply look the other way when a trading ally is snuffed out. Certainly not one as valuable as the Rakers.”
Kimmuriel says quietly, “Then what do you propose?”
At that, Entreri laughs. “You’re asking for my counsel.”
“This is not our territory. We are operating with one hand tied, and Jarlaxle...”
Entreri turns away, because Kimmuriel’s shape in the dark is somehow as distracting as if he were fully illuminated. This is all madness. “If you attack a single location, it could be passed off as an accident, or an over-zealous move—a provocation, but just short of all-out conflict.”
“So the target cannot be a guildhouse.”
“No. One of the minor, outer safehouses. Like the one in Hammer Ward, in Harar.”
“That will not appease him. Given the… alarming scope of his ambition, he will want more—much more.”
“Then make him appeased,” Entreri says. “Have your scouts emphasise its tactical importance. Make the victory total—quick, faultless, beyond reproach.”
“We do not recognise any other kind of victory,” Kimmuriel says.
He ignores that. “And blame the change of plans on an unpredictable element, something that couldn’t have been foreseen. These tensions are certainly agitating other factions.”
“You have a group in mind.” Kimmuriel isn’t oblivious—he understands that he’s being used. Apparently, he doesn’t care.
“The wererats occupy a significant proportion of the sewers, and consider it their territory. Your soldiers will almost certainly encounter them, and have no doubt been ordered to avoid them.”
“Indeed.”
“Tell Jarlaxle that they were far more numerous around the Rakers’ strongholds than expected. Tell him you were forced to keep your men to regions that were unguarded in order to avoid exposure—primarily, around that outer safehouse.”
“Will he believe that?”
“Their current leader, Domo Quillilo, is restless and an agitator. Jarlaxle knows this, he was there when I met him. I wouldn’t be surprised if your men find more wererats than anticipated—and I don’t think Jarlaxle is ready for them to see your people in the flesh.”
“And to the Rakers, we blame the wererats for the attack as well.” Kimmuriel nods to himself. “Jarlaxle will not be pleased with that either.”
“It’ll fall to you to sell it to him, then.”
“And to the city at large?”
For that, they’ll need connections—like Entreri’s. “Must I say it again? I cannot be near this.”
“Very well,” Kimmuriel says. “I will find another way.”
With that, he walks to the door. At the moment Entreri expects him to disappear, he turns his head.
“Is it the shard?”
For once, Kimmuriel doesn’t look imperious or disdainful. He looks angry, and hard, and a little wild.
“I don’t know,” Entreri says.
A grimace. “I gave you what you asked for.”
“And you did much worse. Get out.”
Turning, Kimmuriel fades to that dim smoky outline, incorporeal, and drifts through the wall.
He waits until he’s certain that Kimmuriel is gone, and longer. Then, finally, he lets his shoulders sink, and thumps his fist against the nearest pillar. The pain barely distracts him—he’s half hard, his pulse so thick that it feels like his blood has turned to tar. He despises it.
Anger is solid in the pit of his stomach—sick anger, which began as soon as Kimmuriel slid into his skull and began scavenging.
It doesn’t occur to Kimmuriel that it is trespassing. Entreri knows this; he felt it. Kimmuriel considers the minds and thoughts of others to be open territory—because if he didn’t guard himself against them, there would be no division between himself and others: they’d drown him out of his own head. It’s arrogant, it’s foul and alien; but under the disdain and intellect, Entreri felt something with teeth.
His perfidious brain conjures that view of Kimmuriel pressed against the wall: beautiful, despicable, dishevelled, gasping. Instead he thinks of Kimmuriel sifting his worst memories with sneering mockery. Kimmuriel dragging out a desire he hadn’t known was in him. Kimmuriel’s savage whisper, You are beneath me.
This cannot, will not, happen again.
Chapter 10
Notes:
Book-readers will notice that we've dovetailed into book-plot. We're also at the part where my notes/drafts run out, so I'm winging it from here. Sorry in advance for continuity errors (and... all other errors), please do yell at me about them if you spot them.
Chapter Text
Kimmuriel does not return to his rooms. His innards are crawling, and if he stops he will be angry, unthinkingly, wildly angry—with himself, with Entreri, with Jarlaxle for this entire escapade. But there is yet work to be done, and a dreadful outcome to avert.
Abstractly, lieutenants are equal in power; but when delegated by Jarlaxle, oversight of military operations always falls to Rai’gy. Bregan D’aerthe boasts thirty wizards and ten clerics; it has only one psionicist, and Kimmuriel’s skills have become integral to complex operations.
“You’re simply too useful,” Jarlaxle told him once. “And he’s got far more of an appetite for it, that much is obvious.” Kimmuriel had to concede both points.
By now, Jarlaxle will have briefed Rai’gy.
Standing in front of Rai’gy’s door, he has to keep himself from doing something reckless. Raising his hand, he knocks quickly.
He feels Rai’gy approach, weary mind sparking up with annoyance. Rai’gy’s voice comes through the door. “Hells, who is it—”
“Kimmuriel.”
With that, the door unlocks. Rai’gy is dressed down for reverie, barefoot as Entreri was.
“I looked for you earlier, you weren’t—”
“May I—” Kimmuriel indicates behind him. These little rituals of politeness are very tedious.
“Yes, obviously.” Rai’gy shows him to the sitting room. “Do you want refreshment, I can have the imp—”
“No.”
Rai’gy moves books and papers off an armchair and sits down. “I assume this has something to do with the orders I’ve just received from Jarlaxle.”
“Yes.” Kimmuriel remains standing. Energy is quivering down his spine like runnels of water. “We must reconsider our plans.”
“Our plans? I think you mean Jarlaxle’s plans.”
“You cannot carry out what he intends. We cannot provoke the humans in this way.”
“It’s risky, that much I said to him, not that he—”
“The guild he wishes to eradicate has allies more powerful than we. The recriminations will be overwhelming.”
“So you want me to defy him.” Rai’gy releases a hiss of breath. “Hells. We spoke about this, and we resolved to wait. I’ve been given an order. I’ve been given the same order about twenty times, he’s not movable—”
“But it would be prudent to think on it, instead of blindly executing what he tells you to—”
“Yes, well, Jarlaxle isn’t fond of disobedience, I’m sure you can imagine.”
“I am quite aware,” Kimmuriel snaps. “I have been the voice of dissent again and again these last six years, while the rest of you bowed to almost every proposition that emerged from his mouth, with never a—”
“Because he allows you greater freedom to argue with him. Lucky you.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it.”
“Fine—fine.” Rai’gy holds up his hands. “So what can you suggest that won’t be met with a tirade of outrage, or worse?”
“We must convince him to accept a lesser target.”
“Have you ever known him to do that?”
“No,” Kimmuriel says. “But this time our positions will be staked on it, and more—so we will do it.”
This is territory they have never charted. Rai’gy shakes his head, but he says, “Go on.”
Kimmuriel tells him: the Rakers, the wererats and their leader, and the deception Entreri proposed.
Rai’gy steeples his fingers, digesting it all. “Where did you learn this? We have some information about the wererats, but—”
“I retrieved it from Entreri,” Kimmuriel says. “Without his knowledge.” It is acceptable to conceal the truth from Rai’gy. It would confuse matters, and distract from the situation which confronts them.
Rai’gy grins. “I’d say ‘well done’, but I’m sure he was barely any effort at all.” Kimmuriel recalls all of Entreri’s mind gnashing at him, and Entreri’s hand around his throat, and does not reply. “And you think his reasoning’s right?”
“He knows this place well.”
“One target,” Rai’gy says. “One. Are you that keen to have your head chewed off?”
“Jarlaxle’s displeasure seems preferable to that of hundreds—thousands—of humans.”
“It hasn’t sat right with me since he explained it—not that there was much explanation. Something’s different, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He is surprised to find that Rai’gy does not yet suspect the shard, believing instead that merely being on the surface has turned Jarlaxle’s head. No matter—it is a conversation for later.
“You know,” Rai’gy says, “he didn’t mention Entreri once during our discussions—which is unusual, because for the last few tendays it’s been nothing but talk of Entreri, I was starting to think he was—”
“Jarlaxle has excluded him from the operation.” Kimmuriel endeavours to sound indifferent. “It appears he argued against the entire endeavour, and Jarlaxle deemed him a risk.”
“Well, that’s to our advantage. Safer to have him out of the way—and out of favour is even better. But that still leaves us with another sticking point.”
“Berg’inyon.”
Berg’inyon Baenre joined Bregan D’aerthe only a few months after Kimmuriel. At the time, the decision to acquire a psion from House Oblodra was met with suspicion and widespread fear that he would eavesdrop on all their most private thoughts; while a minor son of House Baenre was a boon and a great coup for Jarlaxle, though Berg’inyon was by most accounts a competent but not exceptional swordsman, and Kimmuriel is the strongest psionicist Oblodra had produced in many generations.
Within Bregan D’aerthe, only Kimmuriel knows that Berg’inyon is Jarlaxle’s younger brother. It is unclear whether familial obligation or favour swayed Jarlaxle on the matter—or, more likely, spite at his siblings as they jostled for power after their mother’s death. Regardless, it was a sensible appointment: Berg’inyon is a proficient field commander with a solid—though not notable—grasp of logic and strategy. More usefully, lesser Baenre nobleboys are raised to be deferential to authority, and Berg’inyon falls in with any plan Kimmuriel and Rai’gy put to him. He is, however, fiercely loyal to Jarlaxle.
Rai’gy says, “We mustn’t show our hand too early. If it looks premeditated, Jarlaxle will reject it—he’ll assume it’s a conspiracy.”
“It is.”
That sobers them both.
Rai’gy thinks of those who have betrayed Jarlaxle before, and the miserable fates they met. He wonders if he is being misled; if Kimmuriel is inveigling him only to betray him. They have been unlikely friends and colleagues these past six years—an Oblodran and a cleric of Lolth—but Kimmuriel is asking him for a measure of trust beyond that, and at great risk.
“It is a course correction,” Kimmuriel says solemnly, holding his gaze. “To preserve the gains we have made, and safeguard the men for whom we are responsible. And ourselves.”
“Yes.” Rai’gy rubs at the lower half of his face and sighs. “Yes, of course.”
“I am not ambitious.”
Unexpectedly Rai’gy laughs, but it is not cruel. “You are, but not in the ordinary sense. If you wanted to foist me out, you’ve less dangerous ways of doing it. And stop rooting around in my head—if you want my opinion, ask for it.”
“You are hardly reticent with that,” Kimmuriel says.
Rai’gy laughs again, and something between them gives. “So—Berg’inyon.”
“He will not appreciate being kept unaware. That might elicit a more negative reaction.”
“His unit’s assigned to the Osiir safehouse near the port,” Rai’gy says. “The one we thought might give us trouble because the Rakers station a wizard there. Perhaps—”
“I see.” Straight away, Kimmuriel sees the reasoning. “And that will be the target. They will execute the sole attack.” It isn’t the target Entreri proposed—but what should that matter?
“It should go some way to appeasing him,” Rai’gy says. “A job well done, a chance to wet his sword with human blood, as he’s no doubt been itching to do—”
“It will make him more receptive, but he might yet baulk at the proposition.”
“He’s a hot-headed thug, like all the other martial types—we’ll manage him. As for the wererats… it would be useful, wouldn’t it, if the men saw them in great numbers in the sewers. It would strengthen our argument about a sudden change in circumstances.”
The image Kimmuriel sees in Rai’gy’s mind is of dozens and dozens of wererats, the tunnels writhing with their shadows. “I will be spread thin,” he says. “Phantasms are one thing, but this will be over considerable distance.”
“Not to worry. I’ll have a few things up my sleeve.”
“Whatever contribution you deign to give.” He makes an imperious gesture, and Rai’gy grins.
“All right. I’m going to rest—you should as well. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
“Yes,” Kimmuriel says, though at that moment reverie seems an impossibility.
He is being pressed down flat, the stone floor hard under his knees and hips. Hands yank his arms behind him, his wrists in a hot, steadfast grip.
I will break your neck—
Kimmuriel comes out of trance as if dropped from a height. He is face-down on the divan, the silk upholstery heated and damp under his mouth, and he is aching. He has an urge to press his hips into the cushions and—
He sits up, pushing his hair out of his eyes, and rights the neck of his shirt. It was a deeper reverie than he intended. He does not know how much time has passed.
The night’s events glower in his memory. Not since he was a child has he had such a lapse of control. Something has been done to him: something unnatural, something perverse. It is as if he has developed an appetite for kobolds or cattle. And now Entreri knows of it.
The human had no notion of what he was doing; did not know that touch can amplify telepathy, or that Kimmuriel’s powers were already unstable. He was at every disadvantage; yet he managed to gain the upper hand. And now Kimmuriel is going to help him do so again.
In Menzoberranzan, functioning as a relay system between their agents is a moderate challenge: the distance is rarely more than a quarter-mile, with only a few hundred or perhaps a thousand minds to shut out.
Now, their units are separated by approximately five miles, and the messages must be borne through the roaring interference from thousands and thousands of unimportant minds. Most psions could not bear even a single missive over such a distance. Kimmuriel’s range and precision are exceptional, but this is like trying to shoot a target he cannot see. His temples ache with the effort.
“—muriel?”
Exhaling, he opens his eyes. He is standing in a sewer tunnel beneath the guildhouse, having warned the soldiers to keep their distance, and Rai’gy is climbing down the ladder.
“I could feel that on the floor above,” Rai’gy says. “What’s our progress?”
“All the men are in their appointed positions, awaiting your instruction.”
Rai’gy shakes his head. “For the record, I do not like this.”
“Duly noted,” Kimmuriel says. “I do not either.” He had thought it might be easier, having first deceived Jarlaxle only hours ago; but it seems every step down this path will be leaden and terrible.
“Give the order.”
Arrowing through the storm of noise, Kimmuriel finds the nearest group—six units, crouched and waiting in the cellars beneath the Rakers’ largest guildhouse.
Hold your positions. Do not advance.
The officer in charge of this unit is Kijan Ahrit: sharper than most, though his shiir habit makes him twitchy and short-fused. Lieutenant?
Those are your orders, officer.
Confusion. Yes, lieutenant.
At the eighth position, he finds Berg’inyon Baenre.
Proceed.
“Yes, that’s an eventuality I’ve already considered, and I believe—”
It’s difficult to hear every word. Jarlaxle is faced away, and speaking in rapid Drow. From the doorway, Entreri waits and listens.
There’s a brief space of silence. Jarlaxle’s voice comes again:
“The imperative is removing them. You were correct, of course—they’re an irritant, it must be done.”
He’s speaking to it. What strikes Entreri is the ease in his voice, the lilt of familiarity. There’s no way to tell how much time he’s spent in communion with it, letting it into his thoughts. Too long, already.
When Jarlaxle first acquired the thing, Entreri considered it just another fancy: something Jarlaxle would master then put aside in favour of another toy. It seems far from that now.
“Yes, things will move quickly from here. They’ll fall to us before they grasp what’s happening, and before they can muster any true opposition.”
Another silence.
“Oh, yes. And once this is done we’ll turn all our attention to it.”
That little word, we.
Jarlaxle subsides into quiet. Entreri listens a while longer, but nothing more is forthcoming. He rounds the corner.
“I thought someone else was in here,” he says.
Jarlaxle isn’t wearing his eyepatch. It’s always a shock to see both eyes, like a kind of nakedness. His hat sits on the wide table in the middle of the room.
“Ah, well,” Jarlaxle says. “Talking to one’s self is, at least, a guarantee of good conversation.”
“I see.” Challenging Jarlaxle seems unwise, so he falls back on protocol. “You—sent for me.”
“I did. Come—attend me. I believe it’ll begin very soon.” Jarlaxle seems animated, excited at the prospect.
They have not spoken alone since Jarlaxle used the shard on him. He doesn’t know why Jarlaxle has summoned him, and he mistrusts it.
Jarlaxle sits on the table’s edge and contemplates the configuration of maps laid out, which together describe half of Calimport. Taking a quill from an inkpot, he makes a few marks on a leaf of parchment kept for his own use—no language Entreri can read. He slots the quill away, rubs at a slight smear of ink on his middle finger, and looks at Entreri.
“I know you don’t like this,” he says.
With that, protocol goes out the window. “Astute of you,” Entreri replies, barely keeping his sarcasm in check.
A smile. “We have a different estimation of the risks, that much is—”
“Because you underestimate them, and the uproar there’ll be when this is done.”
“There’s always some manner of uproar,” Jarlaxle says. “This is hardly the first time you’ve watched us do our work.”
“In a different place, with a markedly different structure of power, and far less staked on the outcome. You haven’t grasped the implications of this—”
“I have,” Jarlaxle says, and the edges of his voice begin to cut. “But it doesn’t concern me—and you shouldn’t be concerned either. However this situation falls out, we can bend it to our advantage. Everything is different now.”
What’s different is that Jarlaxle has cut ties with his reason, apparently. Entreri swallows, and says nothing.
“Any more stirrings in the guild?”
“No.” He’s allowed word of Hand’s death to get out among the guild members. Vicente’s recent disappearance has also caused a stir, and his own name is being whispered alongside it. It hasn’t gained him any popularity—both men were well-liked—but he let it be known that it was punishment for sedition and conspiracy, which will give other agitators pause. “I’ve appointed a new commander of the militia. He knows nothing of you, and as long as your people don’t reveal what they are he’ll follow their orders.”
“Very good,” Jarlaxle says. “Still, there’s more we could do to consolidate your position—”
As you have consolidated yours? Entreri wants to say. “I will handle it.”
“As you like. I don’t doubt your ability to keep the rabble in line.”
Jarlaxle turns his attention to the map. Coloured pins and scraps of parchment indicate the Rakers’ guildhalls, warehouses, and safehouses, with the perimeters of their control inked in red.
“Our targets are so… disparate. In such a populous city—and with so many players—surely it would be more practical to concentrate within a smaller area?”
“Practical, maybe,” Entreri says. “But they represent the Rakers’ regions of influence.”
“Hm.” Jarlaxle is unpersuaded. He’s accustomed to Menzoberranzan, where every group’s power is checked by the unreliability of alliances.
“For example, the Golden Sands Brewers control virtually all of the Sahar sabban in Trades Ward.” Entreri circles the region with his fingertip. “Which includes nearly every vintner, distiller, and brewer in the city. Pasha el Effyd, who runs the Golden Sands, has a longstanding supply agreement with the Rakers for barley and hops. He also allows the Rakers to sell illegal drugs and magic components in Sufontis Market—from which he takes a cut—and he bribes the amlakkar to look the other way. Many groups wish for that arrangement to continue, because they profit from the breweries, or the black market, or both.”
“Even so,” Jarlaxle says, “these isolated safehouses are vulnerable. Our scouts found only a minimal guard presence, a few regular occupants—”
“It’s a display of strength. No one would dare attack them—ordinarily, at least.”
Jarlaxle accepts that with a raised eyebrow. He taps an outlier safehouse in Emerald Ward. “Why this, here?”
“It’s an effective cover, in a place that’s easy to overlook. The only other establishments in that area are a carpenter’s workshop and a sherbet seller.” He’s moved without thinking into Jarlaxle’s ambit, his hand flat on the table beside Jarlaxle’s knee.
Jarlaxle touches the gold ring in his left ear. Entreri has deduced that it allows him to comprehend foreign tongues; he remembers the same gesture when Kitar began speaking in Alzhedo. It’s unclear how much Jarlaxle understood.
“Sher-bet,” Jarlaxle enunciates, with a hesitancy that’s somehow disarming. “Strange word.”
“It comes from Alzhedo.”
“What is it?”
“A sweet drink,” Entreri says. Jarlaxle has that very bright curiosity in his eyes, so he adds, “Usually made with cane sugar, fruit, flowers, spices. They pour it over ice shavings.” As an afterthought he adds, “I’m surprised it’s still there. Most are too frightened to drink it.”
“Why?”
“Sherbet can be made from a syrup prepared ahead of time. I used that fact to arrange a poisoning during a banquet at the villa of Pasha Ehmarik in Tiqadh, years ago. The mark was his brother, who had a sweet tooth and a particular liking for Myratma plum sherbet. After that, there was a spate of assassinations by the same method. The aristocracy, in particular, developed a mortal fear of the stuff.”
“You created a fashion.”
“Something like that.”
Jarlaxle gives a soft, deep laugh. His smile is lovely; and it looks real. “There’s no end to your talents, is there?”
“If there is,” Entreri says, “you haven’t found it yet.”
It’s exactly the right thing to say: Jarlaxle’s face suffuses with pleasure, eyes clear and intent, and Jarlaxle bends toward him.
“I do so like to—” Jarlaxle touches his arm.
The moment slams shut.
Entreri has frozen, his muscles rigid under Jarlaxle’s hand. He’s thinking of the shard, and the stone floor of the training hall under his knees, and the pressure in his head when Jarlaxle touched his face.
Jarlaxle lets his hand fall. Something dislocates in his gaze.
Behind them a voice says, “Ventash'ma—”
It is over quickly.
Once the orders are given, Kimmuriel watches their men retreat into hidden places within the sewers. Then he slides unobtrusively into the mind of a swordsman in Berg’inyon’s unit.
The assault upon the safehouse proceeds, as economical and absolute as any attack they have carried out on a drow House or rival mercenary group. The humans have no chance. Within a span of ten minutes, there are none left alive.
Kimmuriel is still flitting between minds, taking stock, when Berg’inyon strides into the room from the adjoining tunnel, having walked through a teleportation circle.
“Well done,” Rai’gy says.
Berg’inyon scoffs. “No more difficult than culling rothé in a paddock. Work for kobolds.”
Kimmuriel says, “It was well executed, nevertheless.”
“Why did he change his mind?”
A human is drawing nearer from above: irritated, full of Common, thinking in surfacer idioms. Her soft-soled shoes appear on the ladder, and then the draped silk of her dress.
In recent tendays Kimmuriel has seen little of Sharlotta Vespers. She has been leading the trade negotiations: no other human in the guild is so well-known to the Rakers, or has such a skill with mathematics, or understands the intricacies of the agreements between the guilds in this quarter. She is irritated at being recalled when the talks have reached a delicate stage; and she is beginning to suspect foul play.
“He didn’t,” she says. Her Drow is good, though her accent is not.
“You disobeyed him,” says Berg’inyon, and it shocks through them all as if the word were incantatory.
“Jarlaxle’s decision was taken in haste,” Rai’gy says. “Once all our men were in place, it became clear that his assessment of the situation was… even further from the mark than we believed. Your men saw the wererats in the tunnels?”
“We had a fine time evading them. They’re everywhere—Jarlaxle didn’t warn me that they’d be—”
“Precisely,” Rai’gy says. “Because he didn’t know. But now we do know, and it’s clear that the time isn’t right for such a bold assault, not at such risk of exposure.”
“It will still require explanation,” Sharlotta says. “I don’t think he’ll take it lightly, having his orders countermanded—”
Kimmuriel need not look at Rai’gy. Use her, he tells him. That is all they are good for.
“Then we must explain it to him so that he understands,” Rai’gy goes on. “He has so many things on his mind, so much to attend to, that it’s quite easy for him to become remote from certain facts on the ground. The wererats in such numbers—well, you might construe that as a coordinated force, perhaps testing our territorial bounds—or perhaps working with the Rakers…”
Sharlotta’s thoughts become full of static. She is not without wits: she grasps that they are speaking about lying to Jarlaxle.
She says slowly, “He did express some concern about the wererats after Entreri’s meeting with Domo.”
“And he was right to be concerned,” Rai’gy says. “Surely he’ll be receptive to that.”
“What about the Rakers?” Kimmuriel’s role is merely to nudge things along. Much better that Rai’gy is the catalysing force; it will make him more invested. “They will hardly wish to continue the parley over trade—or anything else—after such a sudden and decisive attack on their safehouse.”
“True,” Rai’gy says. “Given that, and all the rest—it would be best, I think, that we deny any responsibility.”
“We might blame it on the wererats themselves,” Kimmuriel says, glancing at Berg’inyon. “There would be no reason for anyone to suspect other forces in these tunnels.”
“There were enough of them,” Berg’inyon says, coolly. “Vermin above ground, vermin below…”
The trap closes. Sharlotta feels it close, though she does not realise there is deception beyond that which she can see. She knows that if she angers them, she will become a pariah like Entreri; and that the trade talks must continue, lest all that work count for naught.
“Yes,” she says, “yes—it wouldn’t be difficult to make Pasha Wroning believe they’re the aggressors. Their alliance with the Rakers has been unsteady of late, since the Rakers entered into talks with us… I can make it known that the wererats are threatening Raker territory.”
“And the Basadoni Guild was unaware?” Kimmuriel says. “Or did nothing?”
“Did nothing,” Sharlotta says, more firmly. “Allowed it to happen—it isn’t our fight, and the Rakers have been spying on us for tendays. In fact,” her eyes light, “it might even make Wroning more eager to treat with us and come to terms, if he thinks they’re breathing down his neck.”
“Make the arrangements,” Rai’gy says.
“I will.”
Her mind fizzes with ideas—people to be met, conversations to be had. She sets her foot on the ladder and clambers up.
Berg’inyon says, “I must go and see to the men. They’re… displeased with how this went. Confused.”
“Yes—go.”
At Rai’gy’s word, Berg’inyon makes a curt exit. Kimmuriel listens to the noise of his mind retreat, until it is subsumed by cavernous echoes.
When Rai’gy breathes out, it is very loud. “Lolth forfend Jarlaxle learns that we—”
“No,” Kimmuriel says—meaning, no, not here, not now, not this. He feels nauseous with something—dread, or loathing for what they are doing; what they have already done.
Rai’gy’s nod looks more like a spasm. “Later.”
“Yes.”
“Is anyone with him?”
Kimmuriel reaches up through the building, to where Jarlaxle is sure to be; but he knows the answer before he finds it. “Entreri.”
“Will that be a problem?”
“No.” Why would it be? Entreri intended all of this.
“All right,” Rai’gy says. “Come on. He’ll be waiting.”
“Captain—”
With sudden energy, Jarlaxle turns. His smile is cold and brilliant. “News?”
The scout gives a quick salute as he comes to a halt. “Captain, our men have successfully blacked out,” the company’s charming term for having killed all inhabitants, “a Raker stronghold. A decisive success.”
“One?” Jarlaxle says.
“Yessir.” The scout looks uncertain for a moment. “That—was the order, sir.”
Entreri, still beside the table, remains silent. He discussed this outcome with Kimmuriel—he proposed it—but it’s still a shock. This was a direct order, given emphatically and several times. In all his experience with the company, he’s never known any of Jarlaxle’s men to defy one of those.
Jarlaxle misses a half-beat; only that. “Of course.”
“The men are withdrawing to the appointed locations, but there are therianthropes in the tunnels—more of them than we expected. Kimmuriel instructed that the retreat should be slow and staggered, to avoid encountering them.”
“How circumspect of him.”
Slowly Jarlaxle turns his head. His scrutiny has an almost physical weight when Entreri meets it.
“Curious,” Jarlaxle says.
“Indeed.”
It occurs to Entreri that they’re in the same boat now, surrounded by underlings they can’t trust. But he isn’t inclined to soften this blow. He wants Jarlaxle to feel it.
More scouts arrive. He takes his leave while Jarlaxle’s occupied.
Descending the stairs, he sees Rai’gy below—and Kimmuriel behind him. They’re conversing in their native tongue. It sounds like hissing.
Noticing him, Rai’gy’s mouth stretches. “Ah, I’d almost forgotten about you. How much longer do you think, Kimmuriel, before Jarlaxle simply does away with him?”
Kimmuriel’s lips twitch. “Not long.”
In the torchlight Kimmuriel looks serene, like something carved from stone. The cuff at the end of his braid is silver, studded with a deep blue opal. Entreri is learning what Jarlaxle’s stamp looks like on other people: on Rai’gy, it’s elaborate and showy; on Kimmuriel, it’s dark and jewelled.
“Astonishing, really, that he allows such vermin anywhere near him,” Rai’gy says. “But even he has lapses from time to time.”
“So it would seem.”
Entreri looks between them, these two hateful faces. “Which of you was the traitor, I wonder,” he says. “Or was it both of you.”
Drow has several words for traitor. The usual term conveys heresy or renunciation of tradition; the word he chooses means, literally, friend-who-gives-poison, or trusted snake.
“You—” Rai’gy’s face contorts. “Close your mouth, you miserable—” But Kimmuriel gives him a sharp look, stopping the tirade. Entreri can imagine what’s being conveyed: no time, we must go.
With that, Rai’gy surges past Entreri in a sweep of robes, and continues up the staircase.
Kimmuriel follows, like a slighter shadow. As he moves up to the step Entreri occupies, he pauses.
His face is like a punch to the gut, awful as only drow can be. His eyes are faintly bloodshot. He doesn’t speak—there are no words—but Entreri feels a gritty pressure at the front of his skull, as noisy and piercing as a scream. Kimmuriel stares, and stares—
—and then it’s gone, and he’s moving beyond Entreri, smoothly rising up toward the landing.
Entreri wonders if it feels like that, when Kimmuriel kills them.
The iron hatch in the door slides open. Siyen’s eyes look out at him, and the tray of food in his hands.
“Open the door,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
He hears the key fumble in the lock and a forbidding clunk. The door creaks on its hinges. He enters.
The drow don’t know of this place; even if they did, they couldn’t enter it. During his previous years with the guild it was used to house Basadoni’s most dangerous or valuable prisoners. It was rare that Entreri was given a ‘capture’ order, but all three times the cargo was housed here until the client came to collect. When Basadoni died, Entreri took the key from his body. It seemed it might be useful.
“Anything to report,” he asks.
A quick bow. “No, sir.”
He approaches the first cell of three. Going down to one knee, he unlocks the grate in the bars. Then he slides the tray through the narrow opening, and locks the grate once more—too quick for the hand which tries to make a grab at his wrist.
Kitar glares at him between the bars.
“I hate fish,” she says.
“Too bad.”
She looks better than she did when she was dragged down here in the early hours of the morning, blood crusted on her mouth, unconscious. The cells are for holding, not privation—there are other dungeons for that—so there is a washbasin and a cot with a mattress. A healing draught took care of her injuries.
He didn’t expect Kimmuriel to spare her—expected him to sneer and take pleasure in snuffing her out. But Kimmuriel, too, is playing a longer game: leverage for leverage, her life for information; because Jarlaxle’s grand surface venture is growing darker and stranger by the day, and even the drow can see it.
She picks at the bread, scowling. It’s all performance: she’s pretending to be harmless. She knows that he sees her as a child, so she’s playing the part. “How long are you going to keep me here?”
“Until you’re no longer useful.”
“And then?”
“What do you think.” His flat affect is a stone wall. Coming up hard against it, she drops the pretence with the merest flicker of her face. Now she looks quietly, viciously practical.
“The same thing they’re going to do to you,” she says, like a few brisk stabs in the side.
Entreri nods. He sits on the stone bench against the wall.
He might have prevented Jarlaxle’s blunder; but the moment is coming when even this semblance of order falls down, and he can’t rely on Jarlaxle any longer. And while bargaining and manipulation have kept him alive, his position is unacceptably weak as long as Kimmuriel can walk into his head as though it were an archway beckoning.
Kitar’s weapons are stowed in the chest beside him. He unlocks it, and lifts out one of her daggers. It’s well-made: the fullered blade is light and strong, with a magicked edge that’s hot to his fingertip, and the hilt is lathe-turned steel, shaped like a baluster. Assassins are known by their methods, and there’s something almost taboo about handling the tools of a fellow professional; but it’s the easiest way to help her understand her situation.
She watches the blade; she watches his face. Thought ticks behind her eyes.
He says, “Tell me what you know about Kohrin Soulez.”
Chapter Text
“I’ll admit, I’m very glad you didn’t go through with it. It would’ve been—well, it doesn’t really bear thinking about, let’s leave it at that.”
“Quaint,” he says. “The idea that I took any decision at all.”
After Jarlaxle was barely prevented from provoking war, there was no sleep to be had. Entreri sat up until the early hours of the morning receiving reports from the guild’s human scouts, and giving short, unsatisfactory answers to questions about the dramatic change of plans.
It was Kimmuriel. Rai’gy might have given the order but Kimmuriel was, undoubtedly, the instigator. His warning was heeded, it seems.
He leans his cheek into his hand and subtly rubs his forehead. He hadn’t intended to start drinking—when he found his way in, there was a bottle of whisky on the table, the seal already broken.
“Here,” Dwahvel says, straightening up from her drinks cabinet, another bottle in hand. “I saved you some of the good stuff. Dondon drank his way through four bottles of it, not that he is—was the connoisseur.”
The reminder of her cousin might be an honest slip, or something else. The implication of a debt, maybe.
As Dwahvel pulls out the cork, he finishes his drink in one swallow.
“So,” she says, “your… allies relented at the last minute.”
“Some relented.”
“And some didn’t. There’s quite a gap between razing all of your enemy's strongholds to the ground and taking a single safehouse.”
“They’re reassessing matters.” Jarlaxle was quiet when Entreri saw him this morning—subdued and thoughtful. At the very least, his lieutenants’ disobedience seems to have given him pause.
“But you think that won’t last.” Dwahvel pours him a generous quart-glass, and one for herself.
“It won’t. They’ll be contemplating the next stage of expansion within days.”
“Gods.” She sits in the opposite chair. “And your lieutenants will go along with that, I suppose.”
“The few that are left—yes.”
“Ah,” she says. “Yes, you’re short of people these days, aren’t you? Vicente’s dead, I hear.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“But he is dead, not long after trying to kill you. Would that have something to do with your saboteur?”
He takes up the glass and tilts it, watching the light move in the amber liquor. “I have the Rakers’ assassin locked in the guild dungeons.”
“I see,” Dwahvel says. “And why haven’t you killed her?”
“She might yet be useful.”
“She tried to poison you.”
“Which is why she’s imprisoned.”
“She came here,” Dwahvel says, “asking about you. It was tendays ago now, you’d just returned. I’ll admit, she was unexpected: I’d heard whispers that the Rakers were training an assassin in your absence, but—well, the survival rate’s always been dismal.”
“What did you give her.”
“Very little—she was only one of many, asking the same questions. She wanted to confirm the rumour that you were back in Calimport—I made her pay good coin for that, like all the rest. She wanted to know if you had allies; at the time you didn’t, and I gave her that. And she wanted to know where to find you. Obviously, I told her I couldn’t possibly know.”
“You did know.”
“And she knew that, somehow. But giving her that information would have meant positioning myself against you, and I hadn’t even had the opportunity to meet you. I’m not a fool, I wasn’t going to side with some wet-behind-the-ears child before making your acquaintance. Fortunately, I’m very good at saying nothing and charging a lot of coin for the privilege.”
“I’m sure. And no doubt you’re grateful for all the additional custom.”
“Oh, I am,” she says. “Tremendously. So let’s talk about the sword, then, and how you’re far from the first to darken my doorstep asking about that damnable thing.”
“All right.”
He hadn’t expected Kitar to be greatly familiar with the sword or its reclusive owner. That paranoid old fool, she said, when he pressed her. Her guild had dealings with him—not Soulez himself, of course, but an emissary from Dallabad Oasis, where the paranoid old fool hid himself behind fortress walls and dozens of guards. She’s never seen him in the flesh—only his daughter, Ahdahnia. No one has seen Kohrin Soulez in decades.
“Well,” Dwahvel sips her drink, “I say ’damnable’ when I should say ‘cursed’.”
“Only on the sharp end of it.”
“On either end. Why do you think Kohrin Soulez lives in a great fortress in the desert? Not because he enjoys the view of circling vultures and endless acres of sand from his bedchamber window, I assure you.”
He first mentioned Charon’s Claw to Dwahvel, in a cursory way, at their second meeting. By her reaction at the time, she knew of his longstanding interest. He’s been trying to buy it since he was seventeen. But, admittedly, never with such urgency.
“Soulez keeps more than the sword there,” he says. “He’s sitting on one of the greatest treasure hordes in the region. Naturally, it’s well secured.”
“And yet that thing comes up again and again,” she says darkly. “There’s no end of interested parties.”
“It’s a significant item.”
“Significant is right. As far as I know, everyone who’s owned it has died holding it.”
“Then they deemed it a suitable weapon for the fight of their lives.”
“The fight of their—” She frowns, her mouth a hard line. She needs only scraps from him to make a feast, and he’s given her more than that. “What’s happened? What’s driving you to th—”
It isn’t a wholly conscious act; more like outrage, or panic. He’s out of his chair, holding her by the shoulder, and the dagger in his hand is at her throat. The edge of the blade has a pull, like magnetism, and he lets it draw from her. Heat runs into him like blood, quenching his headache.
To her credit, she doesn’t make a sound; she doesn’t struggle. Her eyes fix on his with utter horror.
Behind him, her guards have both pulled their swords.
“Stop—”
“My lady!”
Entreri holds up his hand to halt them.
“Think carefully,” he breathes to her, “about whether you want to finish that question, now that you know how I’m going to answer.”
He releases her, but she doesn’t move until he’s seated again. Then she straightens her back, feeling the wound on her neck. “It’s all right,” she tells her guards. “Stand down.” She’s trembling, but she covers it by uncrossing her ankles and briskly brushing down her shirt, as though he’s dirtied it. The sight of her shaken wrings his stomach a little.
She says quietly, “Is it going to fester?”
“No.”
He watches her lever up the lid of a chest and drink a healing draught from it. “Unpleasant,” she says. “Your manners really do leave something to be desired.”
It’s so casual, so impertinent, after a threat which would leave most people pleading on bended knee. He chuckles. “So I’ve been told.”
Returning to him, she picks up her drink and rubs her thumb in the condensation. “Say you do somehow manage to wrest that sword out of Soulez’s death-grip on it. You’ll become the target of all that unwanted interest.”
“So be it.” A fair compromise for a weapon against Kimmuriel and Rai’gy, and every other mage with designs on his life.
She sighs. “I can’t dissuade you, can I?”
“No.”
“Well, then.” She crosses her ankles and rests her cup on her thigh, all business. “What do you need?”
“I’ve invited Sharlotta for a private conversation,” he says. “I know she comes here.”
“Oh, she comes here often, for the same reason you do: away from prying eyes. She doesn’t know about our arrangement, of course. What information would you like her to find here?”
“Tell her that the authorities are growing interested in the guild’s activities—that they’re concerned, and considering intervention. Make her understand that it would be very dangerous to wage any conflict within the city.”
“And Dallabad—no doubt you’ll want her steered toward that.”
“Not obviously. Mention the Rakers’ alliance with them—its function as a trading post, its strategic importance, how it links the Rakers to very powerful allies elsewhere in the south. Mention that it’s lucrative—the tolls, the taxing of nearby settlements. That’s all.”
“Easy enough,” she says. “Consider it done.”
He nods. As simple as that, it seems.
She thumbs impatiently at the blood on her neck. “Have you ever seen it? The fortress?”
“Once, years ago.”
“I can show it to you.”
“How.”
She sends for what looks like a round mirror, framed in ornate brass and sets it between them on the table. The glass shimmers like a liquid when she touches it, and settles into an image: the great dark shape of a fortress standing amid the dunes, lit by a moon like a peach stone. He sees tall wrought iron doors, and stone walls fifteen feet thick studded with flanking towers, and soldiers patrolling the outer and inner walkways.
“That,” she says, “looks like a difficult nut to crack. But not for your allies, I’d guess.”
“No.”
“Have you aligned yourself with serpents, then, or rats? Shadows?”
“The latter,” he says, and lets her refill his glass.
She doesn’t press it. Instead, she walks to the door, opens it, and dismisses her guards. Then she begins to speak to one of her people.
Entreri feels a strange twist of gratitude—that she knew to give him space and privacy for a moment. He tries to gather up the clutter of his thoughts, then abandons the effort in favour of listening to the sounds of the tavern.
After some interval of time, the headache has eased somewhat, but his vision is starting to pull and list. He blinks at the drink in his hand, now almost empty.
“Not sleeping well?”
Her eyes are too damn sharp. “Hm.”
She sits opposite him. “If I suggest that your allies are giving you a lot to think about, are you going to put a blade to my neck again?”
He hums a laugh deep in his chest. “No.”
“Would it be so terrible to simply tell me?”
“Perhaps.”
“Speaking from self-interest, any faction that worries you should surely terrify the rest of us.” She gives him a little smile, which quickly fades. “This is something different, isn’t it?”
He nearly tells her, then—tells her all of it. The very impulse is appalling to him: he would be handing her something akin to a cellar full of gunpowder. Worse, he would be allowing her some glimpse of the private and particular horror he has been enduring ever since he first saw Jarlaxle smile.
“Dangerous ambitions,” he murmurs.
“But not yours.”
“No.” He tosses back the whisky and bangs the glass down. “At present, my great ambition is to live another tenday.”
“Gods,” she says, and raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
She seems worried for him. It it’s a lie, it’s an excellent one—her eyes barely soften, her lip tucking for a moment under her teeth, her outward breath like a weight falling. Unaccountably, he finds that he wants to believe it.
He says, “If I survive this coming attack, I’ll tell you what you wish to know.”
She smiles—stronger, this time. “I’ll hold you to that.”
He’s aware of her gaze as he leans back in his chair and rubs at his forehead.
“You’re tired,” she says. “And drunk.” As soon as she says it, it’s unthinkable—that he could be inebriated, on turf not his own, in company he can’t fully trust. And yet he is.
“You were the one pouring the liquor.”
“You were the one who drank it. And I don’t think you do anything thoughtlessly.” She gets to her feet. “Stay here. Sober up. You’ll need to be sharp when you meet Sharlotta. That’s at least one snake you’ve allied yourself with.”
“She isn’t my ally.”
The Copper Ante is full when he steps up into the main room, crowded with guildsmen from the neighbourhood. It’s almost midnight, the tables clattering with dice and cups and elbows.
He sits at the far end of the bar where the light is bad. The tavern-keep brings him a mead and then pointedly doesn’t look at him again. A quarter-hour later, Sharlotta Vespers pulls out the stool beside his and lays her hands flat on the bar.
“How did he take it?” she says, without preamble.
“Calmly.”
She signals the tavern-keep. Her dress is dark blue silk, and her black hair is tied up with a gold band—she looks well-to-do, but not outrageously so. She’s beautiful, in the way a desert bird of prey might be beautiful. “What does that mean?”
“After he received the news, he chose not to disclose his innermost thoughts to me,” Entreri says. “Imagine that.”
“That isn’t usually an obstacle for you,” she replies, pointing to one of the wine jars on the shelf. She accepts a glass and slides a gold piece across the bar, smiling at the tavern-keep. “The contents of people’s heads seem to fall right out of them when you’re around.”
She flatters him with a certain kind of irony in her voice, because it’s all so much performance. He’s the pasha, she’s his lieutenant; but in truth they both serve Jarlaxle. And she knows flattery doesn’t work on him.
He looks straight ahead, and says nothing.
She stretches her neck, and tries her wine; makes a face. “You’ve spent time with him lately, haven’t you? Alone.”
“Yes.”
She couldn’t know what has transpired between them—the way Jarlaxle spoke to him, which he recognised only much later as flirtation; the casual touches, which now seem like tests of unknown waters; the moment outside his bedchamber, when he thought Jarlaxle might come in; what Jarlaxle tried to do with the shard. But she knows something—or at least, her face intimates that she does. It might be a bluff; it might not.
“Maybe you’ve noticed, then,” she says. “He’s been… strange.”
“How so.”
He hadn’t considered Sharlotta’s perspective on the change in Jarlaxle—but perhaps she noticed something was amiss days before Jarlaxle began plotting conquest.
“Away in his head. He talks to… who knows what, something I can’t see. Just mutters, sometimes. At first it didn’t seem like anything—sometimes I’d wake up and he would be sitting at the table muttering, and I thought he was just thinking aloud. Clever men have their eccentricities—you know, quirks, habits. But lately it’s been constant.”
As she speaks, Entreri’s struck by a sense of intimacy, a sense of how it might be to live in Jarlaxle’s ambit and see him in other aspects than the accomplished captain of a mercenary band. Chaotic, surely; and never dull.
“All of a sudden he’s not interested in things he liked just a little while ago. He’s bored by foods he was enraptured with last tenday, even wine and sweets. He used to read everything he could find—he tore through a great tome on astronomy and then bought a telescope, of all things, and I used to have to drag him away from it, he was so fascinated—but he hasn’t touched any of that, or any book, in a long while. There was a wooden flute he found in a Trades Ward market—he spent hours playing it, but now it’s just gathering dust. He doesn’t even like to talk any more. He was so excited to try everything—until he wasn’t.”
Sharlotta hesitates; she wants to say more. Entreri lets the silence hang, gathering weight.
“We… haven’t had sex in a tenday at least,” she says, at last. “And before that he was voracious.”
It shouldn’t needle at him—Jarlaxle can fuck whomsoever he pleases—but it does. Entreri gives her a brief, cold look. “Have you considered the possibility that he simply tired of you.”
“And every other kind of pleasure? Have you met a greater hedonist than him?”
“No.”
“It’s that thing,” she says, “that artifact. Most of the time he’s so elegant at hiding things, I can’t tell anything beyond what he’s showing me. But with this it’s like he forgets himself, or doesn’t care about what I see.”
He doesn’t make any outward sign, but all this confirms what he’d suspected. Jarlaxle hasn’t simply had his head turned by the scale and strangeness of the surface. Something of a magical nature is being done to him.
Sharlotta isn’t sharing this out of generosity, of course. She’s seeking some confirmation from him that Jarlaxle is no longer a sound ally—some misgiving to justify having conspired with Kimmuriel and Rai’gy. They’ve made quite the pawn of her: she hasn’t merely spread their misinformation on the streets; she’s also lied to Jarlaxle on their behalf.
Which was what Entreri anticipated, of course, when he offered Kimmuriel direction—but he needs Sharlotta to fear betraying Jarlaxle more than disobeying his lieutenants, or this delicate balance of allegiances will collapse. He won’t give her relief on that front.
“Your error was believing that you understood him. You don’t.”
“He’s not a djinn or a god,” she says. “He’s a man.” And certainly, Sharlotta knows men—of the Calishite kind, at least. She has been swindling them all her life.
“He’s a dark elf of outrageous ambition,” Entreri says. “That is something else.”
She sighs, not quite conceding the point. He takes the opportunity to redirect.
“What was the outcome of your meeting with the Rakers.”
“Oh, I assured Wroning we had nothing to do with what befell his safehouse, and he gave every appearance of swallowing it.”
“So he knows that we are behind it.”
“He can’t be certain—and that gives us room for manoeuvre. He is very concerned about the wererats: they’ve threatened attacks before and not followed through, but this… well, either way, it’s made him more amenable to putting trade agreements in place with us, particularly if they come with assurances of protection.”
“Assurances,” he says. “What assurances do you think we can give.”
“The same assurances any pragmatic guild should give a valued trading partner. Or else, why trouble to call ourselves a guild?”
“We’re not a guild,” he says, and now she truly baulks. “We’re a front for Bregan D’aerthe. We continue to exist at Jarlaxle’s pleasure.” She looks as though she might object; he preempts her. “To that end, you should tie up the negotiations quickly—that is the only outcome which might mollify Jarlaxle. The alternative would be quite unpleasant.”
She narrows her kohl-shadowed eyes at him. “I’m aware of that.”
“It’s imperative that we keep them busy—keep him busy. And as you’re no longer able to occupy him,” he feels a peculiar pleasure as he slips that in like a knife, “and the localised struggles of this place don’t hold his interest, we must give him something else. Another military victory.”
“I can’t explain away another destroyed safehouse,” she says. “Let alone anything greater, which seems to be what he’s clamouring for.”
“Ah, but consider what he’ll do if he decides you’re no longer useful.” By her reaction, it seems dear Sharlotta has heard plenty about drow and their methods.
“Gods.” She leans more fully against the bar and sighs. “You know, I never thought I’d miss the old man.”
He snorts. “You don’t miss him. You hated him.”
“Maybe. Even so.”
“Basadoni became your puppet, which pleased you after all the years he made you fear him. If you try to puppet Jarlaxle, he’ll hang you by those same strings. However dangerous you think drow are, I guarantee they’re worse still than that.”
She turns her glass in her hand and says, “How long were you there?”
“A few months. Long enough.”
“Kimmuriel remembers you, I think.”
“I don’t remember him.” He had few dealings with the lieutenants in Menzoberranzan; Jarlaxle had warned all his men away, to avoid unnecessary conflict. “I dealt only with Jarlaxle.” He’d been Jarlaxle’s amusement, Jarlaxle’s experiment.
“They must have met other humans,” she says. “If they thought you were representative of the average, they’d have stayed at home.”
“Not many. Humans don’t live long down there.”
She gives a tense little smile. “Well, at least we’re not there, then.”
“We might as well be,” he says, and her mouth flattens. “Their tactics haven’t changed, and they don’t have any more regard for incidental damage and death. Less, if anything.”
“For mercenaries, they’re very—military.”
“All drow are military. Their society shapes them to kill.”
“I’ve started to get that impression.”
“Be careful who you side with.” This is the most direct he has ever been with her; but now is the time to apply pressure. “However useful you are to them, they’ll enjoy killing you just the same.”
Her lack of reaction is as telling as if she’d shrunk from him. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
“I’m sure you will.”
As he leaves, Dwahvel emerges from the back room. She surveys her customers, her eyes passing briefly over Sharlotta, and she gives him a slight nod.
If Kimmuriel had any illusions about an awakening to rationality, they are quickly shattered. Barely a day after the attack on the Raker safehouse, he finds himself once again arguing with Jarlaxle’s warlike ambition.
“I warned you not be obstructive, Kimmuriel.”
In the second-floor meeting room, Jarlaxle stands with both hands flat on the round table, grim. He is near enough that he would not have to throw a dagger to bury it in Kimmuriel’s chest. That is, Kimmuriel thinks, if Jarlaxle is minded to be quick about it.
He will not cower. He will not scrape or apologise. He is the last living remnant of House Oblodra, and his spine does not bend for a little pressure on it.
“I am not being obstructive. I am articulating deep misgivings about what you have proposed, and I—”
He is conscious of the other lieutenants looking on. Rai’gy stands on the other side of the table, farthest from Jarlaxle. Berg’inyon sits in a chair against the back wall. They have barely spoken since the meeting began—since Jarlaxle declared that he meant to build a great tower, here in Calimport.
“This paranoia isn’t useful,” Jarlaxle says, “nor is it logical. I’m surprised—you should be better than this.”
A precise and nasty cut. The rise of Jarlaxle’s mouth is almost disdainful. Kimmuriel clenches his hands behind his back until the fingernails of his left bite into the palm of his right, burning with humiliation. He wishes fiercely that they could speak alone, as they often did in Menzoberranzan. Instead, they must have this conversation in front of his fellow lieutenants, who do not understand how very wrong this is, how strange and dire.
“Listen to me.” It sounds awful to his own ears—plainitive, desperate. He never expected he would have to resort to pleading for reason. “If we proceed with this, we will be announcing our presence to the entire city. They will not ignore it. You must reconsider—”
“You’ve become presumptuous,” Jarlaxle says. “When I want your counsel, I’ll ask for it.”
It is a shock, almost like pain, to be treated this way. As though he is a mere upstart soldier, speaking out of turn, not Jarlaxle’s confidant.
He takes a step nearer to Jarlaxle, and lowers his voice. “Once you asked me to tell you the things you least wished to hear.” He looks, hopelessly, for recognition in Jarlaxle’s eye. The eyepatch bars him from Jarlaxle’s thoughts, but he finds himself transmitting all the same: listen to me—listen— “Are you deaf to them now? Do you wish for that circle of sycophants after all?”
The hard expression gives a little. Jarlaxle straightens, frowning. “Kimmuriel—”
“If that is what you want of me, I was wrong to follow you.”
Jarlaxle’s eye widens.
Suddenly, Rai’gy speaks up. “Perhaps we might limit the structure to something more modest.” For a moment, Kimmuriel had almost forgotten him. “Then it wouldn’t seem so egregious. Guilds construct new guildhouses from time to time.”
“Hm.” Jarlaxle glances between them, hand poised over his mouth.
One of the doors is unlatched, and swings open—and Entreri enters. With a cold pang, Kimmuriel wonders how much the human heard. He did not even sense Entreri’s approach.
The change is instantaneous: Jarlaxle turns, drawn to the human as if being physically pulled. “Ah, good. I’d welcome your thoughts on this— you’ll remember that I told you I had plans for a tower, like the one in which you killed Drizzt—”
“In the middle of this quarter,” Entreri says, approaching the table in slow, wary strides. “And I told you it would be ill-advised. The caleph’s soldiers would come down upon us like a rockfall—not to mention other guilds who’ll feel existentially threatened by such an aggressive move.”
“On a smaller scale, then,” Jarlaxle says. “That could hardly be considered threatening or unusual. As Rai’gy says, guilds build new structures all the time.”
“They don’t conjure them from nothing in the middle of one of the most populous districts in the city,” Entreri replies.
Entreri is an unpredictable element. He badly needs to ingratiate himself with Jarlaxle, after the reprimand over the previous attack; but he has yet some regard for sanity and proportion. Evidently he is willing to resist this ill-conceived plan, at least to a point.
“There,” Kimmuriel says. “Even your dull-witted, obsequious human can see the dangers.”
Entreri glares. “If you have something to say, say it yourself.” Meeting his eyes makes Kimmuriel’s innards feel as though they are boiling. “I’m not here to compensate for your failings.” So the human was spying. Entreri looks back to Jarlaxle. “If you’re set upon this—”
“I am.”
“We would need to create a front for it. Enchanters, builders, and so on. A full construction operation.”
Jarlaxle nods. “All right—Sharlotta can make those arrangements, I’m sure.”
“And even then, I’d strongly advise against constructing it within the city walls.”
“Would you.”
Entreri firms his jaw. His mind is like the antic whirring of clockwork, as noisy as Kimmuriel has ever known him to be. “This is… something the shard wants, isn’t it.”
Strangely, it is a relief to hear it said aloud, even as Jarlaxle’s expression cools and the room itself seems to draw in breath. There is another entity here, and its intentions matter as much as any other present, or more.
“It uses sunlight as a source of energy,” Entreri reasons. “If you build it on the city outskirts, it can do so unobstructed.”
“It is something I desire,” Jarlaxle says sharply. “And its primary purpose is to represent our dominion.” Dominion? “Building it where it cannot be seen defeats that purpose.”
“Our strength has always been in discretion,” Kimmuriel says.
“We have other strengths now.”
“Do not forget who we are, Jarlaxle, and where we are.”
Jarlaxle blinks, and tips up his hat with a finger. He seems poised between fury and surprise.
“We can mask the construction,” Entreri says. “And I will find a location for it, one that fulfils your purposes,” he turns to Kimmuriel, “without compromising our position.”
Rai’gy makes a sarcastic noise. “I do look forward to your first useful contribution to this entire endeavour.”
“If you still mean to weaken the Rakers,” Entreri’s voice is unchanged, “you’d be well-advised to begin dismantling their supporters. Their region of influence is very large—I have reason to believe it goes beyond the city’s outskirts. If that’s the case, we should prioritise those targets which make those alliances possible.”
“Very well,” Jarlaxle says. “I suggest you make haste to find a place—or I will construct the tower where I choose.”
Entreri bows his head—which would appear more deferential if he were not staring at Jarlaxle all the while—and leaves.
The rest of them begin to disperse. Berg’inyon and Rai’gy are murmuring to each other. Rai’gy gives Kimmuriel a significant look. Kimmuriel falls into step behind, not trusting himself to look at Jarlaxle.
A figure steps around them, and through the open doorway. “Wait a moment.” It is Sharlotta.
“Excellent timing,” Jarlaxle says. “What news?”
“Oh, plenty,” she says.
“It is far too convenient.”
Kimmuriel is invited back to Rai’gy’s quarters under the auspices of discussing work on the Zhoreny theorem as applied to abjuration. But the notes in question lie unregarded on the table, and he is pacing Rai’gy’s sitting room.
“Entreri informs him that we must sweep out the Rakers’ support, beginning with its outermost allies—and Sharlotta provides us with just such a prize, out in the desert.”
“Convenient,” Rai’gy says, looking over his steepled fingers from where he sat in his usual armchair. “You think they’re colluding?”
“Entreri despises her—and knows that she assisted us in deceiving Jarlaxle.”
“So, unlikely, but not impossible.”
Kimmuriel stops pacing in front of the bookshelf, and turns. “Did you see Jarlaxle’s expression? He knows there are other things at work here.”
“If you say so.” Rai’gy shakes his head. “Truthfully, I’m no longer sure what he does or doesn’t understand.”
“He has not lost his senses.” It occurs to Kimmuriel that he is arguing with himself as much as Rai’gy. Trying to see intention or reason in this apparent spate of delusion.
“No? He seemed rather apart from it a moment ago, when he was dressing you down like a grunt with a dislike for authority. Has he ever treated you like that before?”
“No,” Kimmuriel says stiffly.
“Of course not. It’s insulting—demeaning. Why does he have lieutenants at all, if not to advise him when what he wants to do presents intolerable risks? There’s something wrong with him.”
Indeed, the shock of being disobeyed seems barely to have hindered Jarlaxle. “I have never heard him use the word ‘dominion’.”
“Nor I. We’re mercenaries, for Lolth’s sake, not a conquering army.”
“I can only conclude that the shard’s influence is… much stronger than I initially believed,” Kimmuriel says. “With access to a surfacer library I might be able to seek out accounts of it, and—”
“I don’t think it’s the shard,” Rai’gy says. “It’s just a tool, after all. No, I think the surface has got to him.”
“That does not explain—” Why would Jarlaxle fixate on a tower, if not because the shard demands it?
Rai’gy is quick—too quick—to cut him off. “Well, whatever it is, it can’t continue.”
This is not the time to press the issue; but there is an excitement in Rai’gy’s thoughts when he thinks of the shard, and something restless, like greed. Without raking through Rai’gy’s mind more vigorously, Kimmuriel cannot discern if it is ordinary covetousness, or if the shard is luring him—just as, Kimmuriel now believes, it lured Jarlaxle in the North.
He says, “The humans might ignore scuffles between guilds, but they will not ignore a tower. He will endanger all of us.”
“Precisely. I think it’s time to… consider his position.”
He can feel the contortions of Rai’gy’s caution and dread. Rai’gy is handing him a drawn weapon: he could take this directly to Jarlaxle, and have his fellow lieutenant ousted or dead within the hour.
“Go on,” he says quietly.
“We should start making investigations among the men about their confidence in our leader. Take stock of the general feeling.”
“You wish me to scour our own men for treasonous sentiment.”
Kimmuriel is seized by a sense of disorientation—near weightlessness, as if he has been cast over a cliff and begun to fall. He touches the back of the other armchair, using it as an anchor, and stares at the fine brocade. It brings to mind the many times they sat in Rai’gy’s rooms in Menzoberranzan and talked and worked late into the night—and all of it founded upon the implicit trust they placed in Jarlaxle to safeguard them and lead them well.
But Rai’gy was never settled, or satisfied. He owes Jarlaxle the same debt that Kimmuriel does—saved from the fall of his House—but his relationship with Jarlaxle is cooler and more transactional. He has restless ambitions. He has always viewed Jarlaxle as a challenge—one he intended, eventually, to overcome.
“Yes,” Rai’gy says, rising from his seat. “More or less. Evidence that they are displeased with the choices being made, discontentment with Jarlaxle’s behaviour. I’ll make some forays of my own. We can’t risk direct enquiries—if so much as a breath of this gets back to Jarlaxle…”
“I know.”
They have all seen what Jarlaxle does to his enemies. The punishment for this would be much worse.
“So we must go about this with the utmost care. And if we find a supportive majority—then we’ll consider how to, to proceed.”
“Time is against us,” Kimmuriel says. “He is moving quickly.”
“Of course—and so we will have to take a decision quickly. But I think the end is clear. What say you?”
Kimmuriel can still hear it, in Jarlaxle’s soft, taunting voice. You’ve become presumptuous.
“I will reserve judgement,” he says—which is not a refusal and therefore just as damning, where treason is concerned.
“Good.” Rai’gy claps him on the shoulder. “And while you’re at it, keep your eye on Entreri. That’s one piece we don’t want to let out of our view.”
Chapter 12
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Entreri’s network of informants isn’t what it once was—but Dwahvel’s is second to none.
Jarlaxle’s advisors tell him that their next target must be outside the city. Sharlotta tells him of a fortress in the desert, a lucrative outpost for the trade of goods and information. Jarlaxle’s own sources—fed by Dwahvel—tell him that it is governed by allies of the Rakers, and that losing these allies would frighten the Rakers and bring them to heel.
Entreri tells him nothing at all—simply agrees when the Dallabad Oasis is proposed as their target. Jarlaxle may well suspect an ulterior motive; but Kohrin Soulez has been shut away in his fortress for twenty years, and few in the city remember his sword.
“Tomorrow,” Jarlaxle tells them, when they convene in the early hours of the morning. “We attack by daylight, when the sun is highest.”
Even by the low watermark of Jarlaxle’s recent decisions, it’s reckless and bizarre. Entreri fought Drizzt on the streets of Calimport when the sun was high, and the light was enough to hinder a drow well acclimated to the surface over a period of years. Jarlaxle’s men have been here only a few tendays, and at every opportunity shun light above ground.
“You can’t truly be—” Rai’gy is gaping at Jarlaxle. It’s almost comical.
Berg’inyon also looks stricken. “Daylight? But we’ll be at a severe disadvantage, it will be—”
Jarlaxle holds up a hand, and they all fall silent. His grey attire makes him seem uncharacteristically severe. “I am not interested in arguments or objections.”
“The Basadoni army.” Kimmuriel’s voice is quieter than the rest, but it carries like a bell. “We have a not-insignificant force of humans at our disposal, who will not be harmed by the light as we will. Given a few hours we might also assemble several hundred kobolds—
“No,” Jarlaxle says. “Not kobolds, not humans. This is a task for drow, and only drow.” He turns away from them, and his left hand falls to the pouch at his hip. “Go and study this stronghold. It will be ours by sundown tomorrow.”
In full daylight. It is worse than nonsensical: it is idiotic and dangerous.
Kimmuriel is despatched to a Basadoni outpost on the edge of the city, a stiflingly hot underground room. Bregan D’aerthe soldiers come and go, bringing weapons and supplies for a siege. He chooses a corner of the chamber and settles in a rickety chair.
The task given to him, he realises, is also a farce. The sunlight is impossible—even through a scry, it feels as though his eyes are being pierced—and their target is, apparently, inscrutable.
“Anything?” He asks Saezin, one of the company’s more able wizards, after an hour of attempts.
“Nothing. Not a whit. It is shut fast.” Saezin shakes his head, his gloom like a miasma around him. His snake familiar, coiled about his neck, seems no less saturnine. “Surely he does not expect us to proceed with this? We have so little information, it would be—”
“You may take that up with Jarlaxle,” Kimmuriel says, darkly.
Dallabad Oasis is not merely a fortress by construction. It is also formidably defended against arcane divination or Kimmuriel’s clairsentience. By design, the humans who walk its high walls are highly visible, a clear warning—but the rest is wreathed in repelling magic, its interior unknowable.
The company’s arcanists convey their findings to Jarlaxle. No change of strategy is forthcoming. “He didn’t seem concerned,” another of the wizards tells him. “Said it wouldn’t matter.”
“Would not—” Kimmuriel clenches his jaw. “I see.”
Abandoning those efforts, he throws himself into other preparations, moving units of soldiers to other safehouses and identifying teleportation sites in the surrounds of the fortress where they might not immediately be struck blind by the sun.
Time and psionics have little to do with each other, and the hours slope by, voices in the room slurring past his ears. He is listening to the psychic chatter of the men, who gripe and speculate about the target, their orders, and their leader’s willingness is expose them to such risk without ever telling them why.
Sometime in the afternoon a soldier brings him food and cold water, and he allows himself a short respite. Rai’gy, passing through, gives him a vexed look.
“We already have eleven soldiers in the infirmary with sun-sickness. I don’t want a twelfth—you least of all.”
“Of course,” Kimmuriel replies aloud. Silently, he conveys:
If you wished for an outbreak of discontent, you may be assured that it is now an epidemic. The men are concerned. Many of them are angry.
Rai’gy nods. They should be.
The sun goes down. Kimmuriel makes a final, futile sweep of the fortress, which is set like a piece of ivory amid the sand dunes. He scrapes out a few spatial impressions of the interior from one of the soldiers on the ramparts—passageways, a door, a room full of soldiers sleeping—but he cannot risk pressing any deeper. He begins to withdraw.
You are far from home.
He freezes. He has not heard mind-speech—of the sort used by psions—since the murder of his family. It is its own rapid and intricate symbology, which is to spoken language as mathematics is to a scuffed finger painting on a cave wall. It comes not from inside the fortress but beneath it, a network of tunnels which Kimmuriel had dismissed as leading nowhere. And the creature in question is like no consciousness he has encountered before: cold and alien, and sinuously strong.
An illithid.
Kimmuriel has few memories of his brother, Felrien. He was captured by illithids when Kimmuriel was six years old, lured into the wilds while outside the House’s protections. Months later, word reached Menzoberranzan of a fledgling illithid colony in the ruins of Phanlinksal—run by a newborn ulitharid of unusual power. Consequently Kimmuriel was forbidden to leave the House unless escorted by a guardian. Members of his family became paranoid, believing that they were being hunted by this mindflayer cabal. He grew up fearing illithids and what they would do to him if he were taken by them—a fear which did not preclude poring over tomes on ceremorphosis in the House library and imagining, with fascinated horror, how they had mutilated his brother into one of them.[3]
But he is not a child now. No illithid will take him by force, except with great difficulty.
As are you, he replies. Kohrin Soulez is surely paying you well.
The illithid bristles at the insult. Illithids do not work for money; they do not partake in something so banal as commerce. They have thralls for such things. The arrangement is satisfactory to all parties, but coin is of no concern.
Very well.
The illithid conveys a complex series of sounds which Kimmuriel recognises as Deep Speech, and guesses to be an onomastic[1] form. Then, returning to its approximation of Common, it says, I am Yharaskrik.
Cagily, Kimmuriel offers his own given name.
There was a rumour that drow had come to Calimport. I deemed it beyond credence, but here you are.
Here I am, Kimmuriel says, not troubling to reign in his bitterness.
Dyon G’ennivalz? No, the illithid corrects himself. Menzoberranzan. Ah—House Oblodra.
Formerly, Kimmuriel replies, curt.
No longer?
No.
The illithid conveys curiosity and surprise, but Kimmuriel does not volunteer anything further. He feels off-balance, waiting for any sign of hostility or predatory intent.
Yharaskrik remarks, I assume this is not an exercise of your curiosity, but the precursor to something else. Why are you here?
He is taken aback: they stand on opposing sides of this conflict, yet Yharaskrik seems to expect a full account of his intentions. The very fact that Yharaskrik has made contact at all, however, suggests the illithid’s loyalty to his human master is rather perfunctory.
I do not ask so that I may offer this information to Kohrin Soulez, Yharaskrik continues. Know that he is aware of you already—he anticipates you.
That is all the more reason, then, to keep our secrets, Kimmuriel replies.
Are you so beholden to your inferiors? It is possible that your elders neglected to teach you this, Kimmuriel of House Oblodra, so I offer it freely: we who have an affinity of the mind are wise to cooperate, even while our lessers squabble and war.
It grates against decades of lessons about the grave, existential dangers presented by illithids, and Kimmuriel’s instinctive response to this repugnant creature. Nevertheless, he is curious—and there is a strange relief in contact with another psionic being after years alone.
Conquest, he offers. In a few hours, we will hold the fortress.
Then let things fall where they will, Yharaskrik replies, as calmly as if they were speaking of the time of day. And let us commune again when it is finished.
By nightfall he is depleted: every further use of his power leaves him feeling dizzy and scraped out. The pain of the light, the misery of the heat, and the fatigue have melded into a dismal pounding, as if something is trying to break out of his skull.
The last psychoportation is like opening a vein. When Kimmuriel reaches the guildhouse, the pain has clotted. Moving his head brings on swoops of nausea, and every kind of mental noise is like the clanging and clattering of metal.
He goes up to the second floor to deliver his report, nodding wearily to the soldiers he passes. The humans of the Basadoni Guild—with two notable exceptions—no longer enter the guildhouse, which has allowed Bregan D’aerthe proper reign of it. They need not skulk and hide within their own walls any longer. Instead, it is the humans who move quietly and fearfully about the compound.
Rai’gy is present—and Berg’inyon, both grim. Kimmuriel steps up to the wide table where the newly-fetched maps of Dallabad Oasis are laid, and summons a handful of black tokens to him. He begins placing them on the outline of the fortress.
Halfway up the staircase to the third floor, Jarlaxle and Entreri stand together in conference—Jarlaxle in unfamiliar greys, Entreri in familiar black. As Kimmuriel watches, Jarlaxle passes over a dark, filmy bundle: a piwafwi.
“So he’ll be joining us,” Rai’gy mutters. “How surprising.”
“Let us hope Jarlaxle sends him in first, to draw all their arrows.”
“A human pincushion. At last we’ll have found a use for him.”
Descending the stairs, Jarlaxle calls, “Come, let’s convene. Kimmuriel, what have you for us?”
Kimmuriel clears his throat. “As we anticipated, there are few means of entrance to the fortress. The walls are heavily guarded,” he gestures to the tokens he has placed as a representation, “on all sides—forty humans in total, with only minor fluctuations for shift changes. A direct assault would be defeated with ease.”
He does not mention the illithid. Yharaskrik, he suspects, will wait to see who emerges the victor.
“And the courtyard?”
“Five or six humans, led by a wizard.”
“What, then, do you propose?”
“Passwalls,” Rai’gy speaks up. He has also scried their target at length. “Tunnel beneath the structure and up into the courtyard, creating a diversion. It will present an opportunity to surprise the force on the walls and subdue them quickly.”
“Good,” Jarlaxle says. “And within the fortress walls—Soulez’s house?”
“Proofed thoroughly against scrying,” Kimmuriel says. “I could not divine its layout, the protections laid there, or where Soulez might be located. We cannot know what force we will be met with if we try to enter.”
“I see.” Jarlaxle’s gaze rakes thoughtfully over the map, taking in the contours of the terrain. “In that case, the two of you will enter with a small force through the tunnel under the courtyard, drawing attention and allowing the rest to gain entry via the ramparts. That done, your task will be to find and capture Soulez.”
Feeling suddenly cold, Kimmuriel says, “You wish me to be in the vanguard.”
“Yes,” Jarlaxle says, as though it should be obvious. “Remove Soulez quickly and the resistance to us will fold. The fight will be over before the humans have a chance to secure the entrances and dig in.”
Jarlaxle has never sent him into the fray. Previously he was the link, the conduit, between their attacking forces: held back to allow him a full vantage of the field, and free to rove among their enemies, frightening and confusing them to scatter their ranks. Now he will be on the ground, amid the tumult and disorder, one body amongst many. A common foot soldier for Jarlaxle to waste as he pleases.
“I do not—”
Jarlaxle interrupts him. “Now, Entreri, you—”
“I’ll find my own way,” the human replies, clipped and abrupt. “I work better alone.”
It is an objection Entreri has presented before, in vain. This time it seems to carry more weight with Jarlaxle, who smiles as though he knows something.
“Very well,” Jarlaxle says. “Do as you will.” The unfairness of this gnaws, and Kimmuriel barely throttles an objection. “The two of you may leave, if you wish. Berg’inyon, Rai’gy—let us discuss further logistics.”
“The element of surprise will be crucial,” Rai’gy says. “We must not announce our presence before we—”
Kimmuriel bows his head, and begins down the stairs. Entreri is behind him, footfalls hardly audible even on marble. A heat crawls up his back.
The staircase is a broad sweep into the grand entrance hall, lit by lamps in tall alcoves. Three drow soldiers stand on watch. Kimmuriel is conscious of their attention as he turns, exhausted and furious, to look at Entreri.
“Whatever you are doing—”
Until this moment Entreri has been an abstraction, a shade Kimmuriel could almost ignore. Now, stepping down into the hall, the human comes into sharp relief, the edges of his face abraded by shadow. Kimmuriel feels as though he is touching an electric current.
“I would have less regard for me,” Entreri says, “and more for yourself. Your value seems to be falling sharply. I wonder if he would notice at all, if something were to happen to you.”
Rage makes a fist inside him, and Kimmuriel starts forward. Jarlaxle’s creeping parasite of a human is watching all this proceed with pleasure. “Do not make the mistake of believing your value has risen. However much you crawl after him, pretending to be one of us, you will never—”
Entreri’s laugh is like a hammer striking something hollow. “I have no wish to be one of you,” he says. “Particularly now.”
He walks past Kimmuriel and out of the guildhouse.
In his quarters, Kimmuriel bathes and dresses in a lighter robe. When he emerges, Rai’gy has let himself in. There should have been wards on the door, but Kimmuriel neglected to set them.
“Come in,” he says ironically.
“Does he know what we’ve discussed?” Rai’gy’s mind is a tumble like water through a floodgate. “Is he hoping we’ll both be killed?”
“I do not believe so.” Wearily, Kimmuriel leads him into the workroom. “We are now considered expendable. That is the difference.”
Rai’gy takes the bench, arranging his robes as he sits. “Have you ever been on the front lines?”
“No.”
“You can defend yourself, of course. But it’s quite different to attacking from afar—and this is going to be a nastier battle than any I’ve seen. The conditions assuredly aren’t in our favour.”
“No part of this situation is in our favour.”
“That’s not quite true,” Rai’gy says, “at least as far as his leadership goes. My findings were much the same as yours: more and more soldiers are sickening from the exposure—and now this is causing further discontent and confusion. All told, there’s a tangible effect on morale, and confidence in Jarlaxle.”
“Not enough,” Kimmuriel says.
“Well, their loyalty to him isn’t going to erode entirely overnight. And the few who aren’t loyal are scared of him, which is just as much an obstacle. That’s why no one’s tried to overthrow him for a century. The last faction who tried disappeared shortly after, and weren’t heard from again. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
Kimmuriel presses his fingertips to the arch of bone above his eye, trying to relieve some of the ache. “How many?”
“How many conspirators? In the end, I believe they only managed to scrape together four. Rumour has it there were more, but they lost their nerve.”
“We cannot go down this path without certainty of support—and a means of neutralising him.”
“Of course. But sooner or later he’s going to make a mistake, something the men won’t forgive. He’s already come very close. And when he does, and the company truly turns against him, we’ll have our moment.”
“It is possible this is a longer and more convoluted game than we suspect,” Kimmuriel says. “Perhaps it is even his intention to root out traitors.”
Rai’gy shrugs. “It’s possible. But at a certain point, does it matter what he intends? The effect is the same. We’re trying to prevent the company’s collapse.”
“It matters if he will anticipate us.”
Rai’gy rubs his chin, and leans forward. His gaze is very intent, and it is difficult not to perceive his coiling, hissing suspicion. “Tell me, does it trouble you, what we’re proposing to do? For me—well, I followed him because it was expedient, and now it’s not. The calculus is simple. But you—you’re more loyal to him than almost anyone—”
“‘Loyal’ is a strong term,” Kimmuriel says.
“But accurate, I think. In your own way, you like him—admire him, even. Lolth knows, he’s certainly fond of you. I doubt anyone ever believed you were just his subordinate. Had you been there at the beginning you’d probably be running all this with him, as his partner.”
Kimmuriel suspects that is untrue. He has heard the rumours about Zaknafein Do’Urden.
“That is of no consequence now,” he says. “It is irrelevant to this d—”
“It’s relevant,” Rai’gy says, “if it makes you doubt our course. If you’re reluctant and cautious when we need to be decisive.”
“Have I hesitated yet?”
“This seems like a case of cold feet, and we’ve barely begun.”
“I am resolved.”
Rai’gy narrows his eyes. “Are you?”
“If you are concerned that sentiment will restrain me,” Kimmuriel says, “be assured that it will not. Jarlaxle’s position is clear, and so is mine.” And yet in contemplating this course he feels a twisting within his chest, as though some sinew or other is pulling out of place.
“It had better be.”
He tenses, but does not blink. The look he gives Rai’gy is sharp and unforgiving; surely Rai’gy would not be so stupid as to threaten him. “Do not forget that you need me for this.”
Rai’gy, however, is frowning at him with an air of unease. “Kimmuriel…”
“What is it?”
“You’re—there’s blood.” There is a stark image of his own face in Rai’gy’s mind: he is bleeding from the nose.
“Ah,” he says.
Between them, the tension breaks. With a word and a gesture, Rai’gy conjures a cloth and offers it to him, affable. “You’ve been overdoing it again.”
Kimmuriel dabs at his nose and upper lip. He has been suppressing it, but the pain is rather extraordinary, as if a vice has been clamped around his temples. “It is possible.”
“What does it feel like this time? Pressure in your skull? Pain?”
“Yes,” he says.
“I’d like to understand the physiological basis—I say that every time, don’t I? Do you have books on this? You must do.” Rai’gy has crossed to the bookshelf, and is running his finger along the row of spines.
“A few,” Kimmuriel says. “Psions of my House were… generally cavalier about physical symptoms.”
“Mhm. You must have got it from somewhere.”
“The fifth on the right. The red spine.”
Rai’gy takes the volume down from the shelf and begins to leaf through it, eyes saccading at speed. “I’d guess it’s raised intracranial pressure—which is extremely dangerous, I’m sure you’re aware.”
“It is a hazard of my nature.”
“I’m almost loathe to ask—but what did your family do for medicine?”
“There are psionic methods of healing,” Kimmuriel says. “It is not my specialism, but I can attempt—”
“Well, rather than trying to scrape out a barrel that’s almost empty,” Rai’gy says, “let’s try my more traditional sort.” Laying the book down on the table, he flexes his fingers. He is about to cast.
“I would expect Lolth to refuse healing spells for a heretic.”
“You’re not an Oblodran,” Rai’gy says, smiling slightly. “That House doesn’t exist—it never did. Much as Teyachumet[2] doesn’t exist, and never did. The only House you have is Bregan D’aerthe, and Lolth smiles on our endeavours. Well, most of the time—your casual blasphemy not withstanding.”
Rai’gy holds up his hands on either side of Kimmuriel’s face, near enough to feel the heat from them. The magic floods in, cool and liquidlike through every cavity and nerve in Kimmuriel’s head, and he nearly closes his eyes in relief.
“How’s that?”
The pounding has lessened; the vice has fractionally eased. “Improved.”
“Seems to have stopped the bleeding—but, well, it’s just a bandage, not a cure.”
“I will retire,” Kimmuriel says. “There are yet a few hours before…” Before some fresh hell, he knows not what.
Rai’gy nods, and makes to leave. “Concentrate on Dallabad. We can’t stage a coup if all the men are dead. If you’re dead.”
Which is, Kimmuriel has begun to understand, a very real and possible outcome. Some hot thing is swarming in his throat and behind his eyes; the jars near the door rattle, and he clamps down quickly on his power. There is, however, no avoiding the sense that Jarlaxle is abandoning them to the vicissitudes of a desperate fight.
“Jarlaxle did not outline a role for himself?” he asks.
“No. But he didn’t say that he’d be sitting it out.” Rai’gy rakes his fingers through his hair, and Kimmuriel realises that he too is struggling with his anger. “Pleasant to think about, isn’t it, that the most chaotic element in all this is our own leader.”
“Immensely.”
“If he stabbed us in the back it would almost be a relief. At least we’d know where he stands.”
“Here.”
“This looks like the work of an infant.”
“I don’t insult your informants, Entreri.”
The parchment weighted down on the table between them is covered in charcoal scribblings and sketches, smudged and scrawled and overlapping. Dwahvel points to a rough square in the middle.
“This is the main courtyard, do you see? Four doors, one on each side.” She traces a line, and then another. “These are corridors. The spirals are traps, and those marked like this are arcane—the rest are physical mechanisms of varying complexity, most very lethal. The crosses are doors kept locked. And here are Soulez’s private quarters, which he will almost certainly retreat to if things are going badly.”
As she describes it, the picture begins to cohere. The halls of Soulez’s house roll out before him, with their traps and alarms and bolted doors. Soulez is as greedy as he is fearful; his house is a monument to both.
“Most of this came from a soldier recently dismissed from Soulez’s service for attempted theft,” Dwahvel says. “He’s no professional cartographer, but he knew it well. There are also annotations by someone who used to trade information with Dallabad, and has a decent knowledge of the fortress’ eastern side.”
“Useful.”
“I can’t help you with the corridors around Soulez’s private chambers, they’re restricted to only a handful of people, and none of those people would ever give up what they know. Based on the rest of this layout, every inch will be trapped and alarmed.” She drums her fingers against her cheek. “This place is—and I’m being generous—a thief’s nightmare.”
“I’ve broken into worse,” Entreri says—but he can appreciate a stiff challenge when it’s presented to him.
She brushes charcoal dust off the table and fixes him with a curious look. “You’re not going to share this—any of this—with your allies, are you?”
“No.”
“Do they know what they’re walking into?”
“Their scrying barely scraped beyond the outer walls.”
She gives a low whistle. “Gods—no love lost between you, is there?”
“In this, they’re not my allies,” he says. “It’s crucial that I reach Soulez first. If I fail, all this will be for naught, and I’ll be in a worse position than I am now.” He doesn’t need to spell out what that means; she knows enough, and has guessed more.
“All right.” She folds her hands. “I’ve plotted a route which avoids the majority of the traps, though it’s quite indirect. The only problem… is that you’d need to climb the northern wall—the most heavily guarded side—in broad daylight, without being noticed.”
His lips twitch. “I assure you, my allies will attract plenty of attention.”
The reports spread over his worktable have begun to blur. Kimmuriel rests his cheek in his hand and closes his eyes. There may be time for a few hours’ reverie, if he is not disturbed.
As he is drifting, he hears the door to his quarters open and close. No doubt a soldier delivering fresh reports. There has been a certain decay of decorum as their time here has worn on, but he does not have the energy to dress the man down for entering without permission.
Then he realises he cannot hear the man’s thoughts, and sits up straight.
Jarlaxle.
“This is not a good time,” he says.
A cup is set down beside his arm. Steam uncoils from it, hot and damp upon his cheek.
“Drink your tea,” Jarlaxle says.
It is not tea at all. It is a potent concoction of kammarth and stijor mushrooms, to ease the symptoms of energetic fatigue. The bitter smell is like an open door into the Underdark: for a moment he is sitting in his workroom in the Clawrift, smelling dried stijor fibres, wet ink, stone, and temperate air. He does not ask how Jarlaxle knows the recipe, which was taught to him by Izyr. Jarlaxle knows many things he should not know.
Kimmuriel looks up. “Why are you here?”
If Jarlaxle knew of their plotting against him, they would already be dead. That notion is little comfort as Jarlaxle walks around the workbench, coming into view. The object of all this dismay and fury, seeming quite serene.
“No need for formalities,” Jarlaxle says, with a little chuckle that makes the hairs rise on Kimmuriel’s nape. “This is merely a social call. I’m concerned with the wellbeing of all my men, as you know. And I hear from the healers in the infirmary that you’re often resistant to their prescriptions.”
“They have not the first idea about psionic ability nor its somatic complications,” Kimmuriel says. He cannot resist adding, “I am surprised you would take an interest.” Jarlaxle has been working him near-ragged since their arrival.
“Concerned, as I said.”
“Concerned,” Kimmuriel echoes. Why, then, have you ordered a siege in daylight?
“Always a skeptic.”
“Someone must be.”
“More so of late.”
“I will not agree with decisions I consider illogical.”
“Because you do not understand.” Taking up a stool, Jarlaxle plants it on the adjacent side of the workbench and sits down, close enough that his knee glances off Kimmuriel’s thigh. Kimmuriel stifles the urge to move left, away from him.
“If there is a logic, explain it to me.”
He does not expect a clear answer. He receives none at all. Jarlaxle’s head tilts, and he smiles.
“I have tried to warn you,” Kimmuriel persists, feeling his voice rise and sharpen in his throat, “because I have seen—”
He does not know what he means to say. He nearly tells Jarlaxle about the discontent among their men, and the rising pitch of anger. It is his duty, as lieutenant—and his inclination, strangely. Perhaps Rai’gy was correct, that it will not be so easy to distance himself from Jarlaxle.
Jarlaxle idles his fingers over the nearest report, spiderlike. “You’re very good,” he says, “but as I’ve told you before, you’re not omniscient, my friend.”
“Nor are you,” Kimmuriel replies, “though you might have been led to believe otherwise.”
Jarlaxle laughs, as he might have in the past if Kimmuriel were particularly blunt; but it is duller and harsher, and it grates. “Careful.”
“I will speak my mind. You knew that when you asked me to join you.”
“Are we being nostalgic now?” Jarlaxle rests his chin in his hand. “Yes, I did. Hard to miss, being met with skepticism and critique at every turn even before I’d recruited you.”
“You enjoyed it at the time.” He feels spiked and brittle.
“I did—so did you. A change from hiding and being meek and invisible, no?”
“Perhaps.”
“You’ll remember that you were still resistant to my proposal when your House was falling down around you. Not terribly logical.”
“I did not know you.”
“You knew you were about to have no home, no family, no allies—and still you were reluctant. Imagine if I’d left you there.” Now Jarlaxle’s smile has a bite. “What a waste that would have been.”
“Good that you remember.” This earns another chuckle.
Kimmuriel lifts the cup to his lips, looking at Jarlaxle all the while. For the first time he wonders if Jarlaxle would poison him.
It tastes as bitter as usual. Any aftertaste is surely his imagination.
Jarlaxle leans back in his chair, glancing around the workroom. “What of your research? Still focused on astral projection?”
Kimmuriel nods to the workbench in the corner, where a large piece of parchment is spread out, half-covered in inked topographical lines and labels.
“Are there not already maps of the Astral Plane?”
“Such documents are for ordinary travellers,” Kimmuriel says. “This is the first survey of psychic phenomena across the Astral Plane and its demiplanes.”
“For a readership of one?”
He could not guess how Jarlaxle knew to say that. Chancing upon the illithid, and their subsequent exchange, has drawn up a peculiar longing for the company of other psions, such as he has not felt in a long time. When Jarlaxle intruded, he had been thinking of his House.
“You miss them,” Jarlaxle says.
“I…” Instinctively, miss seems too strong; but perhaps it is not entirely the wrong word.
“Do you think of them often—or at all?”
Jarlaxle knows the answer to that, of course. “From time to time.”
He does not often dwell on the matron mother, except with the relief of having survived her. Nor his sisters, spiteful as they were. But on occasion he allows himself to remember his flawed, wounded brothers, and his teacher, and the peaceful hum of his House.
“When I decided to recruit you,” Jarlaxle says, “I undertook to find out whether there are other drow with your capabilities.”
“You hoped to find one less difficult, I suppose.”
“No, not at all. It was in the interests of keeping you, actually.”
“Explain.”
“I don’t believe it will have escaped your notice that psionic creatures tend to be extremely insular. As a rule, they form isolated enclaves which exclude all but their own kind. Your House was less isolationist than most—but it was, by our standards, deeply secretive and separatist. The tendency toward collectivism among psions is so strong that individuals seem to fare rather badly when cut off from the group. Like a severed limb, you might say.”
“And you believed that I might seek out another enclave after my House was destroyed.”
“Quite so.”
“There are no other Houses like mine,” Kimmuriel says. “I have never encountered a drow psion who was not of my House, nor are there other—”
Jarlaxle raises an eyebrow. “So you did look.” Kimmuriel clenches his fingers around the cup slightly. “It’s all right. You were by far the most independent-minded of the lot—to the point of trying to cut yourself off—but I didn’t imagine you’d settle into an organisation of ‘mundanes’, as your mother used to call us, and be perfectly contented. I was even prepared for a negotiation, if you received… other offers.”
“It is a moot point. There are no others. I am alone.”
The corner of Jarlaxle’s mouth lifts a little. There is a wistfulness in it; some manner of understanding. Then he glances at the map again. “Well. Be sure you don’t stray so far that you can’t return.”
I am not the one standing on the brink, Kimmuriel thinks. “There has been little time for it, of late,” he says.
“Once we’ve taken Dallabad, we’ll be in a very favourable position. Things will become much easier.”
“Until you identify your next target. And the next.”
“Yes—and they too will fall easily. No one shall prevent us from achieving our ends.”
Kimmuriel suspects that the ‘us’ is not Bregan D’aerthe, and has not been for a while. The company has become a weapon for invasion and conquest, their lives be damned.
“Is there an end to it?”
The look Jarlaxle gives him is implacable. In the shine of his iris there is something like a holy fervour. “Oh, I don’t think so. Not when there is so much still to do.”
It is not entirely surprising, and yet it startles him like a fist to the stomach. Jarlaxle does not intend for them to leave. This short foray into surfacer affairs might stretch on for months or even years, a prospect he has not allowed himself to entertain because it is simply unacceptable.
He does not say this aloud. He cannot reach Jarlaxle with reason, or indeed anything. The imperative now is to survive Jarlaxle, which is easier said than done.
“You will do as you will,” he says, quietly.
As if cued, they both stand. He follows Jarlaxle to the door, wishing to see him leave with his own eyes and then lock and trap the door behind him.
“Oh, and Kimmuriel—”
Jarlaxle turns, hand raised to his own face. Then he lifts the eyepatch away from his eye.
Jarlaxle never removes the eyepatch in his presence. Caught by surprise, Kimmuriel braces for a hail of psychic noise. He is depleted, and Jarlaxle is so near—
It does not come. Instead, he is met with a soft, dense hissing, like steam from a vent. Some form of language, perhaps, but too distorted or too alien to discern phonemes or words out of it.
What he can sense very clearly is energy—masses of energy, the air vibrating before his eyes. When he concentrates on its frequency it becomes dense and sucking black, a queasy aura pulsing around Jarlaxle.
Rooted in the centre of it is something still more obscure, and it is stirring. The room, impossibly, seems to have darkened. There is a cold and ageless taste like sour water in the back of Kimmuriel’s throat. As he watches, the entity spreads out, turbulent, billowing, and he thinks of the illithid in the tunnels beneath Dallabad. This—thing is also psionic, that much he can discern; but it is even less drow than Yharaskrik. There is a consciousness there—an intellect, and it seems seething and… malignant.
You should remember, Jarlaxle thinks, with a clarity which is terrible to hear, that I see everything.
Then the eyepatch is back in place. As if a curtain has fallen, every trace of the entity is suddenly gone, the shadows subsided.
Jarlaxle sweeps his cloak over his shoulder. “Be ready at dawn,” he says.
“Why?” The shard draws energy from sunlight. That is the unspoken justification for this lunatic strategy. But Jarlaxle has not included the shard in their plans—has not mentioned it at all.
Jarlaxle smiles. “Advantage.”
Notes:
1 I like to imagine that illithids have wildly complicated names in Deep Speech and most of their telepathic conversations are spent pronouncing them over many hours.[return]
2 Rai'gy's surname is ‘Bondalek’ but he came from House Teyachumet. Go figure.[return]
3 One of those details about Kimmuriel's family stashed in the Menzoberranzan sourcebook. Ceremorphosis is the process by which people are (forcibly) turned into illithids. There's a wildly accelerated depiction in the trailer for Baldur's Gate III (cw for gore and body horror).[return]
Chapter 13
Notes:
This one's super belated, mea culpa. It took a bit of wrangling. I even drew myself a shitty diagram to try and keep the logistics straight. I'm really grateful for the nice comments/feedback, they've been a great encouragement : )
Lots of canon remixing/theft in here, esp. a couple of setpieces I like in the novel.
If this chapter had a title it would be 'Kimmuriel's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day'.
Chapter Text
The psychoportation circle hisses shut.
Scrying from a distance could not have prepared Kimmuriel for it. The light splits through his brain, and his eyes sting and water as he blinks.
He has seen many places in his exploration of the planes, but few so barren and hostile to life and perhaps even reason. It is early, yet the sky is already burning. Ungirded by the city’s towers and roofs, it yawns in every direction without end, a hot and empty blue. They stand amid a huddle of low broken walls, dustblown ruins. Sand hisses around them: rust-red, rising in dunes as far as the horizon. The air itself is dust and heat.
Ahead, he sees the white bulk of the Dallabad fortress. Berg’inyon and the rest of the men will arrive under the cover of the oasis on the fortress’ eastern side, where there is thick foliage and a few scant settlements.
He treads toward Rai’gy, the sand sinking beneath his boots. “Let us get out of the sun. Quickly.”
Rai’gy nods, and from a pouch he scatters grains of clay upon the ground. Then he raises his hands, palms out, and begins to chant. His eyes crease in his concentration.
Deep tremors from beneath. The ground ruptures apart, sand sliding down the steep sides as the fissure widens. Soon it is large enough for them to enter, a slope down into shadow. Rai’gy walks ahead, already casting again. Kimmuriel follows him.
They proceed through the hot, red dim. Each time Rai’gy casts, the tunnel shakes as the magic gouges dozens of feet into the sand and rock. Drow have used this spell for centuries to excavate new tunnels and caverns, but through matter far more solid than this. Kimmuriel is gripped by a sudden vision of the sand pouring into this shallow passage to bury them alive.
He reaches up—and finds humans in their dozens. “The courtyard is directly above us.”
Rai’gy nods. “Are you ready?”
“I am prepared.”
By now the sun has climbed higher; even the humans retreat from it. They wait for it to reach its zenith, the soldiers sitting against the walls of the tunnel.
“I can’t believe he’s committed us to this,” Rai’gy whispers, after a long duration of silence.
“Utter folly,” Kimmuriel says quietly.
“Well, once the darkness is up you could almost imagine it’s just another assault on some minor House.”
“I doubt that.”
A snort from his companion. “So do I.” Tensely, Rai’gy spins the black passwall wand around his hand. “At least they’re humans. If they were elves, we’d be signing our own writs of execution—”
Noise bursts into Kimmuriel’s head. It is the humans above, all at once agitated with shock, fright, and—awe? “Something is happening.”
“Our people?”
“No—the humans, something else.”
“What? How could they have found us—”
“No matter. We must go.”
Rai’gy raises the wand and makes a last rapid pass through the motions. About them the tunnel violently shakes. A shaft of light pierces through from above, and what falls in about them is not sand but cracked white stone and billowing dust.
Through that opening, Kimmuriel sees a human face drain of its colour in fear. Then the shouting begins.
As the drow soldiers skulk through the oasis, Entreri breaks away toward Dallabad’s northern wall. The sun is at its height; there’s scarcely any shade for cover. He crouches under the drooping fronds of a palm tree, watching Soulez’s soldiers on top of the wall.
Dwahvel was incredulous when he said he meant simply to climb it. “It’s a sheer vertical wall.”
“I have equipment.”
“They’ll notice a grappling hook being hurled over, don’t you think?”
He wouldn’t be so obvious, but he humoured her. “What do you have in mind.”
Suddenly, the guards above are running, scattered and dismayed. Their shouts ring within the walls, before he loses sight of them.
The potion Dwahvel gave him is black as bitumen. He endeavours not to think about the ingredients as he uncorks it and drinks it down. It’s glutinous and oily, sticking to his teeth and the ridges of his hard palate. The outlines of his hands become black and dissolved—and he watches the effect overtakes his arms, his chest, and the rest of his body, as if they’re sketched in ink. Experimentally he presses his hand against the hot wall, and finds that he can make the black veneer stick to the stone. Once stuck, it’s difficult to prise it off. He begins to climb.
No soldiers peer over the edge; no one marks his movement. As he climbs higher, the warm wind tugs at his piwafwi. He can hear commotion, raised voices, running footfalls.
Reaching the lip, he stays low and listens. Then he raises himself enough to glance over, and blinks against a violent flash of light.
It’s a tower. Like the one in which he killed Drizzt—less massive and yet more imposing. Having ruptured through the courtyard, it’s growing before his eyes, the column glittering like a rough-cut diamond in the sun. In half a minute it’s taller than the fortress itself, high enough even to cast a shadow with the sun overhead.
No sign of Jarlaxle. He must be nearby—or inside.
On the walltop Soulez’s soldiers watch aghast, their voices scattered and rising:
“Is it ours?”
“How can it be, you ever seen something like that here—”
“I wouldn’t put it past him, he’s always been up to bad business and this—”
“Look, just get down there!”
Then the tenor changes, from confusion to fear, and he knows what they’ve seen.
“Gods, what is—”
“That’s a—”
“No—fuck, how can—”
“Drow!”
The yell goes up. It spreads like smoke carried on the wind. “Drow!”
“Hells!” Rai’gy shouts. “Go!”
Kimmuriel follows the other soldiers, rising up through the opening in the stone. The sun is nauseously bright and hot. He blinks against it, hand cupped over his eyes; and stops in disbelief.
In front of him, pushing up absurdly from the centre of the fortress, is a tower. He can barely stand to look at it—refracted light needles out from it as though it were a prism, every surface scintillating.
Cryshal-tirith was what Jarlaxle called it, when he performed the same feat in the North. This is why he desired an attack in daylight: because the shard wished it.
Beside him, Rai’gy swears.
“Did he—”
“No,” Rai’gy says, “not a word, I assumed he would wait—it’s going to make us all blind—”
“Get the darkness up,” Kimmuriel says. “Quickly!”
Spheres of darkness manifest above, casting them in deep shadow. Just in time, they are hidden from the humans on the walls—arrows thud into the ground around them, shot blindly and in desperation.
Human soldiers in red and black are swarming like ants out of the arched doorways to the fortress. Kimmuriel breathes in, and concentrates.
Slipping over the the parapet, Entreri cuts the throat of a Dallabad soldier and drops the body over the wall. The man’s red and black cloak covers his piwafwi.
Drow are rising up out of a crevasse in the courtyard. As they land they summon darkness above them, a variation on a tactic he’s seen before. The black mass casts a shadow like a thundercloud’s. Jarlaxle has put them at a severe disadvantage; but they’re better drilled and prepared than Soulez’s men, who must rarely see real combat while posted to a stronghold miles from Calimport, and who never dreamed of meeting a full drow force.
His eyes pick out a shape in the middle of the disorder: unarmed, unarmoured, not gesturing or chanting or even moving. As he watches, a human running with a sword in a ready grip stops and crumples at Kimmuriel’s feet.
It jolts him into motion. The shadow of Jarlaxle’s tower gives some meagre cover, and he slips down the fortress’ inner wall. His body sticks to the stone with that black shimmer wherever it touches. Across the courtyard he sees humans weaving and struggling and falling down, drugged with venom. The drow—always merciful—kill any who don’t succumb straight away.
On the ground he crouches to take stock. Ahead is the frontispiece of the Soulez house, a white marble colonnade in front of high wooden doors. Soulez’s men are emerging, their faces full of incredulous dread at this enemy which has appeared within their walls. Entreri straightens and makes a straight line to the doorway.
A concussive shock cracks through the air. His hearing gutters, reduced to droning and rumbling like the grinding of earth; then rises again with a whine. Steadying himself, he glances back.
The air around Kimmuriel shimmers like a mirage. A dozen of Soulez’s guards lie collapsed on the flagstones around him and several more are stumbling and clutching at their heads. Sweat stands out on Kimmuriel’s forehead, his eyes pained.
At that moment, a figure steps out onto the balcony. A thin man, his black hair and beard turning silver, dressed in red and black silk. Outrage twists his face, his eyes wide and black and fervid.
The sword—Charon’s Claw—is a grotesque thing. Entreri’s pulse kicks up at the sight of it, the sword he has been trying to buy for fifteen years. It’s thinner than he imagined: a red blade with a black gutter, the crossguard curved into a white cadaverous cage above a white notched hilt. Something obscure flashes from the pommel. Kohrin Soulez carries it high like a banner.
The young woman behind Soulez is young and stern, dressed in a red stola and bearing a short sword. His daughter, Ahdahnia.
Entreri takes in the sight of them—and Charon’s Claw. Then he pushes through the doorway, into the house.
The ground is strewn with drowsy and unconscious humans—pitiful animals. Bolts hiss by, thudding into those still standing.
Drow soldiers hurry forward with blades and crossbows readied. Kimmuriel moves around behind them, stunning any human that comes near. The middle of his vision is too sharp; the rest, too blurred. His ears are full of his own breathing.
One of the wizards, Quiyan, collapses a pillar with crackling energy, crashing it down onto a hoard of humans. An explosion to the left sends bodies flying—screams in Common and Drow—while a searing line of arcane fire tears into a crowd of humans, scattering them. Kimmuriel weaves a lattice of energy around himself, turning toward the next attacker.
Light—light, sharp in his eyes, and he stifles a scream.
When he can pry his stinging eyes open again, he perceives an irregular chiaroscuro upon the courtyard flagstones. Their darkness is being dispelled. He looks up—the pull of energy comes from above—and sees a figure on a balcony, reaching out a hand.
Sensing advantage, humans press in from all sides. The drow around Kimmuriel close ranks, but they are struggling in the sunlight, overwhelmed.
Sweat slides down his nose and stings his eyes. He lets the energy pour through him, and a crackling rope of lightning lashes at the nearest humans. One of them falls, face and throat bright with burns. Others are driven back, scorched and coughing.
More of the darkness is dispelled.
“Sir—”
“Out of the sun,” Kimmuriel shouts to the men around him. “Now!”
They scatter.
Rumbling comes from beneath his feet. The mouth of the tunnel is closing, even as drow soldiers are hurrying to clamber and levitate out. Another dispel. Kimmuriel grabs for the mind of the man above; but that black hand closes into a fist and his grip breaks.
Inside the tunnel, two soldiers are rising up toward the surface. The courtyard is shaking so violently that he can scarcely keep his footing, and he is nearly blind in the light.
“Lieutenant!”
Below he sees the stricken face of Viertun, an officer, trying to rise out of the tunnel. He seizes the energetic strands of Rai’gy’s transmutation, trying to force the opening wider, but they are suddenly severed. The ground quakes thunderously as the passage collapses, cracked stone and dust tumbling in. Then the flagstones seal over.
Forced to retreat, he spares one hateful look toward the human on the balcony.
“Damn!” Rai’gy is beside him, backing away from a gaggle of human soldiers even as he conjures another sphere. The effect is a pitch-black canopy broken here and there by scattered, searing light.
“That is Kohrin Soulez,” Kimmuriel shouts. “He has a—”
“Lolth knows—a glove? But what kind of glove can—”
Kimmuriel shakes his head. Things are aligning, and when they do it is like a violent chemical reaction in him. “That is what Entreri came for.”
Rai’gy’s expression darkens. “That maggot. I’m going to—”
An arrow cracks against the flagstones beside Rai’gy’s feet. A nearby mercenary makes a thin, shocked noise, his neck pierced. More arrows flash past—one snaps against Kimmuriel’s barrier.
“If he retrieves it from Soulez—”
“He will not. I will not permit it.”
They are forced apart by a volley of arrows. Rai’gy ducks behind the rubble of the pillar—leaving him the lone target in the middle of the courtyard.
A sword swings at his head, and he nearly flinches—but the barrier around him bears the slash, and another, and another, now spitting with energy. He lets it crackle into his hands and vents it into the nearest human, who tumbles over with deep gouges in his chest and arms.
More humans rush in. Kimmuriel drags nearby wreckage toward him—the weight is immense—and crashes shattered rock and marble into any figure he can see, bludgeoning and crushing them. Dustclouds roll out, obscuring the bodies. He cannot make sense of the noise—shouts, screams, metal clashing and screeching, and his blood booming in his ears.
He starts toward the shade, trying to bring forth another defensive wall. The humans are still coming—
Something punches into his back, below his left shoulder. The force of it is like being shoved and he stumbles, winded. As he lurches away, he feels an awful pull—a blade being dragged out of him. He reels about to face his assailant: tall, black-eyed, mind all ire and fear.
The axe comes up again. He feels his pulse in the wound; little else. The human’s body becomes a web of energy, tangled like fungal hyphae. In the centre of the chest he finds the core of cardiac muscle thrumming and forces energy into it. It stutters, seizing up, and the human clutches at his chest. Then the heart bursts.
Kimmuriel steps over the body—in time to see a spasm of light lash out from Jarlaxle’s tower like a thrown spear and smash into the balcony. Marble thunders down, dust scattering in clouds. Half the structure has simply burnt into vapour, the wall black.
When the smoke clears, Soulez is gone.
The vestibule is as gaudy as a temple to Waukeen. Mosaic walls depict a cityscape tiled in yellow and green and amber, with the desert a sea of glittering gold-leaf tesserae rising up to the ceiling. Gold veins through the white marble floor. The Soulez family are old Calishite nobility, but Kohrin’s dealings with thieves’ guilds and criminal gangs have made them wealthier than in all their years of serving at the caleph’s court.
Soldiers pass Entreri as he climbs the stairs, shouting and unsheathing weapons. He goes unnoticed in the Dallabad livery: Soulez’s people are looking for drow. The house is live with fear, very near to panic.
“Close the doors! All of them!”
Soulez staggers in from the balcony, Ahdahnia close behind.
Below, the great doors to the house groan as they slam shut, and soldiers heave a wooden bar across. From behind a pillar, Entreri watches a few bloodied soldiers hurry up to meet the master of Dallabad Oasis, who has left most of his people to die or be captured outside.
“Dark elves! Here!” Soulez jerks his head. “Coming out of the ground, those vile—”
Ahdahnia says, “What reason have they to attack us, we’ve nothing they—”
“You know very well why,” Soulez growls. “There is only one cause for which they would come here!”
“But—”
“No! I will not let them take it! I will—”
Soulez begins spitting orders at his men, wild-eyed. Ahdahnia watches him. There’s a bitterness in her face Entreri recognises, and a plan begins to sketch itself in his head. He steps unnoticed into the upper hallway and through the open door.
The long corridor has no windows. The polished black marble floor is like a mirror. At the end, above the entrance to the next passageway, there hangs a grinning skull. It’s familiar, somehow.
Behind him, he hears doors being barred, traps being set. Kohrin Soulez is locking himself into his own tomb.
His vision is all foreground, the rest a deranged blur. It is nauseatingly hot and bright. His hair sticks to his face and neck, and under his robe his shirt is sodden with sweat. His wound burns.
Humans are all about him. He crushes one against a pillar—stuns another—pierces a third with a hail of sharp black quartz splinters—
The archway to his right has caved in, and he drags out dusty rubble and slams it into any human which tries to approach as he goes forward.
Ahead, a human is battering his sword against Rai’gy’s arms and neck. Cracks vein through Rai’gy’s stoneskin—and it begins to disintegrate. Frantically Rai’gy raises his hands and begins to cast again, fingers twitching through the motions for a wounding spell.
It is too slow. The human stabs him through.
Running, Kimmuriel sees him shudder and cough. Rai’gy’s hands fall. The human drags out the sword, and Rai’gy slumps to his knees. Blood blots across the front of his robe. Red with malice, the human brings the blade up in a swing toward Rai’gy’s neck.
It would be best to leave him. Perhaps the arcanists will be able to resurrect him; but likely they will not, and all notion of a coup will die with him. Their plan to depose Jarlaxle seems madness now, in the face of the dire and insurmountable power Jarlaxle has acquired, the feats of which the shard is capable. But Rai’gy is like a cave crawler with the scent of blood: he will never let it lie; and he will drag Kimmuriel down with him.
And yet—
Drow lie dead all around. The cost of this victory will be high, if it is a victory at all. Kimmuriel thinks of how Jarlaxle smiled when he asked whether there would be an end to it. If Jarlaxle is not stopped this will be only the first battle of many, and every one will be theirs to lose.
He breathes in, and out. He has studied the theory. From a certain perspective, it is merely another kind of psychoportation.
When he blinks it is as though there is a skin upon everything and the skin is being stretched almost to splitting. Figures distort and writhe. The pressure is fiercer than a simple spatial traversal: it is crushing and pulling his skull, his insides—before his perception snaps away like torn parchment.
His bright, hot surroundings recompose. Rai’gy is on his feet, unbloodied. The human raises the sword.
Energy is roaring through him. Kimmuriel expels it in a flare of heat, the air hissing into flame. The human shrieks, clothes and hair catching, and is burned through like dry torchstalks. It turns to fine ash which the wind lashes against a pillar.
Rai’gy lets out a high, unsteady laugh. “Excellent timing!”
Breathless, Kimmuriel nods to him.
A cry makes them both turn. Shapes are cresting the walls. The rest of Bregan D’aerthe has arrived.
It’s a convoluted path to Soulez’s quarters, but he finds doors unlocked and traps unlaid. Dwahvel’s information is good.
Deeper in, the house changes. Black floors give the illusion of standing in opaque water. Tapestries bear black script he can’t read. The mosaics are backed in black: a city in the sky, people in chains, skeletal faces, gestural mountainous shapes. There are traces of earlier imagery, tiles flecked with green or amber, which only emphasise how entirely it’s been erased.
Noble houses breed despicable practices. He’s seen necromantic circles, spells daubed in blood, sigils of death cults and devil worship. These images seem inert; but there’s a wrongness about them which sits in the pit of his gut.
Ahead, he sees the tall golden doors to Soulez’s quarters. Three soldiers wait before them, visibly distressed.
“—leave your posts! They’re getting in, there’s no way we—”
“So what good will it do? If those things get in here, we’ll be dead in minutes—”
“You have a duty!”
“Oh, fuck duty—”
Killing them would be trivial, but he won’t give Soulez such a warning.
He stashes the Dallabad cloak inside a deep vase—too obtrusive—and crouches in an alcove to open the latticed oriel window. As he slips out, the black aura around his hands and feet sticks to the wall.
Emerging into the sunlight is like stepping into hot water. The stone is scorching to the touch. Vines twist in every direction like frayed rope. He scales along the wall, keeping low beneath the window sills. The latticework shows him the corridor, and he climbs past the anxious guards.
“Derafsh said they’ve broken through two of the doors—”
“Gods, we’re dead—they’re going to—”
He reaches a window set deeper into the wall, framed by thick vines. Through it is a wide, opulent room divided by silk screens: Soulez’s quarters.
He slips over the windowsill, looking for traps or triggers.
He finds himself faced with a huge fresco: a grinning white skull tiled on gleaming black. Cores of red light glow in the sockets. It’s difficult to pull his gaze from it; and something about it reminds him of the sword. Why would Soulez—
“Ahdahnia!” Soulez’s voice echoes in the corridor, suddenly close.
Entreri retreats, crouching behind a screen. It won’t be long now.
Humans on the ramparts begin to drop, stabbed and shot with sleep-poison. The drow shove them aside or clamber over them, jumping and levitating down to the courtyard. Suddenly their number has swelled by dozens, and the shadow over the courtyard grows as more darkness is conjured.
“You can move about with greater ease than the rest of us,” Rai’gy calls. “Get inside—get to him, keep him from securing Soulez before we do.”
Kimmuriel nods. “I will.”
“I’ll send as many men after you as I can.”
Turning away, Kimmuriel passes through the house’s outer wall. The last manifestation has exhausted him: his power feels shaky and thin, and his mind aches with the effort. No matter—it is imperative that he get to Soulez. The very notion of that gauntlet in Entreri’s possession is—unacceptable.
He finds himself in a cool, dim corridor of deep green tiles. The absence of sunlight is such a profound relief that it dizzies him; he nearly stumbles as he hurries to the main hall.
Bodies lie all around—drow, human. Levitating to the higher floor, he stuns two humans waiting with weapons drawn.
Other drow are inside the house, fighting humans near the stairs. He recognises Cahzin, an officer, clinched against the banisters with a human woman. She is trying to drive a dagger into his neck. Kimmuriel drags the human off and pins her to the wall. She struggles, splayed like a specimen across a setting board. Panting, Cahzin swivels about and slits her throat. The body falls.
“Thank you, I—”
“Where is Soulez?”
“Retreated further in. Some humans ran that way, couldn’t understand what they were saying, all that ugly gibbering—”
“Have the men force the front doors open,” Kimmuriel says. “I do not care how you do it. I am heading to Soulez, and I will require support. We do not have much time.”
He does not wait for an answer.
“Set the defences! They must not break in!”
Soulez is approaching. Entreri hears doors slam, the clicking of a trap mechanism being wound up. They’ve failed to keep him out, but their fortifications will slow down the drow.
Beyond the door, in the antechamber, Soulez is berating his daughter.
“—good are you? We are nearly overrun—”
“How could we have known? Ordinary attackers we could deal with—raiders, wandering monsters… But there was no way to anticipate this!”
“Useless! This would have been avoided, had you—”
The doors to the room bang open. Ahdahnia goes to the farthest window and locks it, rapping hard on the lattice to test the seal. Her hands are trembling. Then she moves to the nearer one.
Entreri keeps still as she passes his hiding-place. He didn’t expect such an opportunity to present itself; but for a moment she is alone, all sight lines clear.
He grabs her by the shoulder and pushes the dagger against her neck, tipping her head. She gasps.
“Stay quiet,” he murmurs. “I’m sure this isn’t where you wish to die.”
“Who—” She tries to lean away from the knife, but his grip is stronger. “Who are you?”
“A frustrated buyer,” he says. “I don’t like being told ‘no’. I greatly dislike being told ‘no’ three times.”
Her shoulders lift. “You.”
“If you raise your voice, if you reach for a weapon, I’ll kill you here. I’m sure you understand.”
She twitches, breathing sharply through her nose; but she nods.
He says, “You know who I am.”
“Yes. I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve fallen in with those things.”
One-handed he unbuckles her sword belt and relieves her of it. Then he slides the dagger away and moves around to face her. “Those things aren’t your greatest concern at this moment.”
She swallows. “Just s—say your piece, or—”
“I’m going to offer your father a deal,” he says. “Your life, for what I want. What do you think his answer will be?”
“He won’t make a deal with you.”
“Even to safeguard his own daughter.”
“He—” Her mouth twitches up, venomous. “He won’t let you take that sword. That thing is—it matters to him more than anything.”
“An exemplary father, evidently,” Entreri drawls.
“He wasn’t always…” Momentarily her eyes turn distant. “That thing—”
“What about it.”
“It’s evil. He’s—he’s been rotting ever since he got it…”
He can’t entertain doubt now. Hesitation will get him killed.
“Our leader will require someone to run this place,” he tells her. “It won’t be your father—either way, he’s going to die. But it could be you.”
When she speaks, it’s nearly breathless. “I’m not going to stab him in the back for you.”
“That’s a lofty position to assume, given that he wouldn’t hesitate to do as much to you.”
There’s a reflexive anger; but he’s disturbed her. “No, he…”
“Your brothers are already dead. He sent them out to die. You’re the last.”
She covers her mouth. “Oh, gods—”
“Nothing you do will prevent me from killing him. But I have no reason to kill you.”
Her eyes are stricken. “What do I have to do,” she says.
“Nothing. You do nothing. You do not get in my way.”
“And what are you—”
Footsteps, nearing. The doors swing wide. “Ahdahnia!”
Entreri lowers his voice. “This place is already lost to you,” he tells her. “You’re overrun. Be clever, and you might live.”
“Clever,” she echoes, softly. She holds his gaze, then steps out into view. “I’m here, father.”
Kimmuriel has never seen a place so defended—not even the most mistrustful of drow Houses.
Traversing the hallway, he drifts over pressure plates and tripwires, between snares and arcane trap sigils, through locked door after locked door—until he reaches doors he cannot pass through. They are enchanted all over, the energy thick like an iron wall. Several minutes pass as he tries to find a counter.
There is a scuff mark on the floor, as if something weighty were dragged across it. He touches the doorknob and hears a click—then a soft, aerating hiss. Thick grey vapour blooms from the ceiling.
He repels it out of instinct, but his barrier has thinned. Inhaling it scorches his throat—immediately his lungs grow hot and irritated and he begins to cough.
Retreating, half-bent, he feels his way back along the wall. His throat is tight, and alarm squeezes his lungs. The poison is thick and narcotic—ironically, not very different to the drow oloth’arr. As he pushes the matter out, he wheezes up a blackish cloud with a hacking cough.
“Lieutenant!”
Mercenaries are running toward him—four of them. “Where is the rest of your unit?” he manages.
He knows even before their officer, Mael’erin, begins to speak; their dismay is like a bitter scent. “Everywhere’s trapped, we lost four on the way—”
“We were sent to find you, sir.” Another soldier, eye closed and face bloody. “We didn’t know there’d be—”
“No,” Kimmuriel says. “There is a great deal we did not know.” He turns to the door. “Begin disarming this. We must get further in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mael’erin finds a space in the wall and digs in a bladed tool. There is a heavy metallic clunk and carefully he opens the door.
The floor is uneven on the other side. Latent arcane energy glows under it like a banked fire. Kimmuriel directs them to levitate over.
The black halls seem labyrinthine as they proceed. One of the men ventures down a hallway and is nearly immolated by a glyph. Kimmuriel is reminded of Baenre’s temple to Lolth, a place to which he once accompanied his Matron. Worshipful and menacing, with morbid iconography upon the walls and a residue of fanatical violence and decrepitude. A place where life is cheap, and often extinguished.
His subordinates are unsettled by it. They are full of muttering, aloud and not:
“Didn’t know they built things like this—”
“Does this human worship death?”
They break through the next locked pair of doors, and the next. Arcane traps pack the walls and floors. Kimmuriel clenches his teeth in frustration as he labours to dispel one after another, poorly assisted by Quiyan who is bleeding from the shoulder.
They come suddenly to the terminus of a hallway. Ahead, three humans bark to each other in their ugly tongue, raising their weapons. Two vast golden doors stand behind them, more ornate than anything in the vicinity.
Soulez is here, Kimmuriel knows—and so is Entreri. This must be the place.
“Ahdahnia, why are you—”
Entreri steps out from behind the screen.
At the sight of him, Kohrin Soulez’s face contorts with such fury he expects to be attacked outright. Soulez’s hand clenches on the sword hilt by his side.
“I knew it. When they told me that you had returned—”
“You knew that I’d come to collect,” Entreri says. “Good.”
“And brought them with you, those demons—”
“They’re not demons. But they are quite merciless.”
“Despicable thief,” Soulez barks. “How dare you come here to steal from me!”
Entreri shrugs. “This might all have been avoided. My last offer was more than reasonable.”
“It is mine!” Soulez’s knuckles turn white on the sword hilt. “It is not for sale—I will never sell it to you—”
“Everything is for sale,” Entreri says. “And this is your last chance to bargain. Give me the sword and the gauntlet. I’d consider that a fair trade for your daughter’s survival.”
Soulez’s gaze darts to Ahdahnia. Entreri can see the calculation, and hates it.
He says, “When my allies arrive—which will be very soon—they will want to kill you. Both of you. And only my vouching for you will restrain them.” Not even that. “As you’ve seen, they aren’t particularly restrained by nature.”
“Vouch for me? You brought them here—”
“There are no other choices left to you.”
Soulez’s voice is cold and sharp-edged. “What guarantee do I have?”
“None,” Entreri says. “But as dying is otherwise a certainty, you—”
Something slams against the doors, shuddering them violently. With that reminder of what is imminent, all of Soulez’s pretence drops. “No! No! I will see you dead first, I will—”
Soulez draws the sword and rushes him, raising it for a reckless overhead chop.
The voice he hears is Dwahvel’s. “Don’t let it touch you, do you understand? If you touch it without that gauntlet, you’re dead. If you let it nick you, you’re dead. Any contact whatsoever—dead. It’ll char the flesh right off your bones.”
He darts to the left, sword and dagger out, and the blade cleaves past.
“Thief!” Turning about, Soulez slashes for his shoulder. Light bends down the blade’s black trench and it scrapes along his sword with a metallic scream. Reverberations jump up his arm. “How will they treat me when they find your corpse?”
Entreri shoves the red blade away. “The same way they treat all humans,” he says, parrying Soulez’s next whipping cut with his dagger in reverse grip. Soulez’s right side is exposed, but he can’t risk pressing it. “Consider your men outside—what’s left of them.”
“No!” Soulez lunges. Entreri feints left, then dodges right. The next slash lags after him, but the force behind it is savage. He veers backward, giving ground to Soulez’s wide, volatile swings.
“Fight! Fight me!” Soulez’s eyes have a crazed shine. “You cannot do it, can you? Not when I have this, not when I—”
Slowly he circles Soulez. Soulez is quivering with wrath, cutting and feinting for a gap in his guard. At the next low thrust he steps back again—and veers around a high swing as Soulez sweeps the blade between them, wrist rolling to give it violent torque.
“Where are you going? You cannot leave!”
He can now hear the racket in the corridor: Soulez’s soldiers are shouting to each other, panicked, and there comes the clangor of fighting. The drow are nearly here.
Soulez hears it as well—he bares his teeth and lunges, a driving stab for the chest. Too much forward momentum: Entreri parries it and darts past, slicing at Soulez’s exposed side, and Soulez stumbles away, gasping.
They square off again. Teeth bared, Soulez leads with a high slash. Entreri sidesteps it.
“Coward!” Soulez spits. “Fight me!” The sword drops fast like a guillotine. Entreri dodges, flicking his dagger slantwise, and cuts shallowly into Soulez’s neck. It only incenses Soulez further.
“I will kill you for this! You break into my home, convinced that you can take all this from me! You think that you can usurp what I have?”
Circling, Entreri says, “Look where we are. You know that I can.”
“I know, yes,” Soulez says, “all about you—the master assassin, resorting to stealing an artifact you do not understand! You know nothing about it—while I have kept it and known it for forty years!”
He turns Charon’s Claw through a wide arc. Blackness trails behind it—a consistency like dust—and holds there, unfalling. Turning, Soulez sweeps the blade through a second arc, and a third. Eerie black fans of soot hang between them, masking Soulez from view. This is unexpected.
“Come, thief! Try to take it from me!”
More vicious cuts and swings, sometimes trailing that thick soot. It’s real—moving through it is like walking into sand tossed up by the wind—and the air is thick with it. The opacity makes Soulez more unpredictable, but it seems to hinder him just as much. More and more his style is overtaken by brute aggression, incongruous with such a fine, lightweight sword. He wields it like a polearm, chopping and hacking.
In the hallway, the shouts in Common suddenly rise, clashing, frantic. Entreri circles toward the wall blazoned with a skull—and suddenly the barrier between them is absolute. He can’t see Soulez; but nor can Soulez see him. He ducks under a horizontal slash.
All sound beyond the door ceases. There’s no more time.
In the quiet, he listens to Soulez’s noisy, furious breathing. He senses the downward stab of that sword toward his head, and guesses Soulez’s position and the reach of his arm. He keeps moving, circling all the way around—a wild swing misses him by a finger’s breadth—and rises in a burst, stabbing forward.
His dagger sinks into Soulez’s back. Soulez spasms. “A—ah—”
“Drop it,” Entreri tells him.
“No! It’s mine, y—you cannot—”
He lets the blade pull on Soulez’s soul. Heat bleeds into his hand. “I can. I will. Now.”
The sword clangs to the floor. “You will regret this,” Soulez hisses, “it is mine, it is mine, you do not know the consequences—”
“I know what will happen if you don’t cooperate,” Entreri says. “If your obsession with it—”
Surrender the sword and gauntlet. Immediately.
Like a whipcrack. There’s a dark shape in front of the golden doors.
Entreri snatches at the gauntlet on Soulez’s hand and drags it off. It’s a quick sleight to tuck it out of sight, and he throws to the floor the fake gauntlet Dwahvel gave him. Soulez doesn’t see it; but Ahdahnia does, and he gives her a steady warning glance.
Around them, the soot fans are breaking apart. Fine black powder drifts down. On the other side is Kimmuriel, bloodied and dusty and nearly glowing with rage.
There you are.
Kimmuriel is struck first by the muttering: voices hissing and raving—psychic residue. A mind has festered in this room.
Entreri steps away from Kohrin Soulez, dagger in hand. He is limned in black, a shifting, tearing outline, some metamorphic effect. It makes him appear inhuman, more like something that has crawled out of the Abyss. He watches Kimmuriel fixedly.
The red sword lies on the floor at Soulez’s feet, beside the black glove. The glove which dispelled Rai’gy’s spells—and his own power. Soulez wants it very badly; his mind itches for it. The woman who accompanied Soulez looks on.
“Is it you?” Soulez is nearly vibrating with rage. “Are you the one in charge of—” He speaks a different Common to the kind Kimmuriel has been hearing incessantly in the city, which makes him difficult to understand.
“I am.”
“Good—” Soulez struggles to stand. “I, I am ready to offer you excellent terms if you will consider my—”
“Be quiet.”
The man falls into shocked silence. He recoils as Kimmuriel approaches.
Kimmuriel looks at Entreri. He says in Drow, “If you move, I will leave your corpse in here with his.”
Entreri’s mouth quirks. “As you wish.”
The doors are held shut by a wooden bar. It is exhausting even to attempt to heave the bar across, but for that very reason Kimmuriel cannot wait for the rest of the company to break in.
Greetings again, Kimmuriel Oblodra.
Alarm lances through his gut like ice. Turning, he sees the illithid seep out of the wall, and become corporeal.
He has seen depictions in literature and art; the reality is more horrible and more freakish. The creature’s bulging and ill-shapen head appears at first wreathed in tentacles in restless, sinuous motion. It is all over a waxen purple-grey reminiscent of murky waters, but for its milk white eyes. It towers over even the human Soulez, dressed in a simple linen robe.
Yharaskrik. He pushes up what thin defences he can manage. If the illithid becomes hostile, it will not be enough.
“Now you arrive!” Soulez shouts. “I sent for you an hour ago, how dare you ignore my order—”
“You have lost.” The illithid’s voice is thick and distorted, like the sucking of water. “The outcome was apparent from the outset.”
“We can negotiate,” the woman says. “We can offer them control of the—”
“Pointless. They are drow. They will not negotiate.”
Soulez looks at Kimmuriel, beseeching. Kimmuriel does not try to hide his disdain. The human’s mind flares up.
“No! No, I order you to—”
Yharaskrik gives a gurgling laugh. “I do not intend to oppose them.”
“They will kill you as well—”
“They shall not.”
After all. Yharaskrik is mind-speaking now. We will reach an understanding.
On what terms? Kimmuriel replies. Our leader does not like mind-flayers, and the limits of your cooperation are now obvious.
I shall not bargain with your leader—another thrall. I shall make terms with you. I understand the nuances of your situation. You will require my assistance soon.
“You disgusting, decrepit fiend—I own you, you cannot disobey—”
“Humans present an interesting study,” Yharaskrik says aloud. “Infrequently their short lives produce something of minor merit; but in the majority they seem devoid of all but basic sentience, chasing that which is without import or permanence.” The illithid looks toward Soulez. “Your utility is exhausted. I shall heed no more commands of yours.”
Understand, Kimmuriel hears, lesser creatures will try to yoke you to them, in the belief that they can master you. You may permit this for a time, if it furthers your own ends—but do not allow yourself to be ruled. It is not the proper order.
“You cannot disobey me, you are—”
Another awful, deformed laugh. “I am pleased that you will not live beyond the hour. Goodbye, Soulez.”
I should have liked to consume him, Yharaskrik adds, but the display will be gratifying. The silky motion of its tentacles seems—satisfied. I shall be waiting.
It fades and slips out of sight.
Possessed by a terrible calm, Kimmuriel drags the bar the rest of the distance and opens the doors.
Drow rush in. Entreri doesn’t move.
“Secure this room,” Kimmuriel says. “And everything in it.”
There’s an exhausted, feral energy about him, despite his stiff shoulders and false calm. Like a smokepowder revolver with the safety off. Watching him communicate silently with the illithid was more than disconcerting—horrible, at some atavistic level. Entreri suspects he won’t tell his men or Jarlaxle about the illithid. More disobedience; another sign of an agenda that isn’t Jarlaxle’s.
Kimmuriel notices his stare and meets it. All the threats Kimmuriel has ever hissed at him are in that severe and hating face.
He has the gauntlet. The sword lies just beyond arm’s reach. In front of him, Soulez is breathing faintly and quickly like a cornered rat.
“They’re here to kill you,” Entreri mutters to him. “If you cooperate, I’ll see that she’s not harmed.”
Soulez shudders. “Very well,” he says tonelessly. “In exchange for her safety, I will—”
He lurches forward. Snatching up the gauntlet, he pulls it hard onto his hand. If it fits differently, he does not notice, because he lunges for the sword. Ahdahnia tries to prevent him, grabbing for his arm. “Father—”
Soulez shoves her away. Holding up Charon’s Claw, he turns. “I am not going to bargain with you,” he snarls at Entreri. “You thieving, worthless—”
Black smoke is rising from Soulez’s arms and neck—thicker and thicker, like kindling catching light. He makes a pained choking sound, and smoke comes from his mouth. Then the skin on his face begins to blacken and burn and peel away like slivers of garlic paper.
“You—you—” Soulez’s voice rises into a scream.
Kimmuriel shouts, “Get the—”
Even as the Bregan D’aerthe soldiers draw in, Entreri hesitates. The horror of this artifact is in front of him, starker than a hundred of Dwahvel’s warnings. Cursed, she called it. This house is evidence enough of how it’s unravelled Soulez for forty years; made him paranoid and fanatical. And now it’s killing him.
Entreri looks at Kimmuriel, bloody and dishevelled, face set in its coldness; and surrounded by mercenaries who are tired, injured—angry. It would be easy for them to execute him here. Dub it an accident; blame Soulez or some other opportunist. And if not now, then later—unless they feared him too much to try. Unless—
The sword falls from what remains of Soulez’s burning hand.
Entreri catches it. The gauntlet is a good fit, firm and well-made. Even through the thick warded leather, he feels a pull.
He looks down at the heap of ash and blacked bone splinters which was Kohrin Soulez.
“I warned you,” he murmurs.
Chapter 14
Notes:
No rating change yet, but beware! herein there is sexual content and it's not sweet or nice. (If you've been OK with everything so far you'll be OK with this; it's really just heavy on tension, posturing, repression, and shame.)
Chapter Text
He wants Entreri hauled before Jarlaxle in chains.
Instead, the human walks out of that room with Soulez’s glove on his right hand and Soulez’s red sword at his side; and the men do not—will not—go near him.
The woman, Ahdahnia Soulez, watches it all with frank, sallow fear. “Escort her to the courtyard,” Kimmuriel tells his battered mercenaries. “Jarlaxle will wish to see her.”
Mael’erin nods. “What about the rest?”
“Round them up outside. Use what force you must to make them comply, and make sure they are incapacitated. I will have no more surprises.”
Mael’erin smiles—brief, grim. “Sir.” He shoves Ahdahnia, forcing her to walk. He and his men escort her out.
Alone in the room, Kimmuriel stares at Soulez’s burnt remains. Wisps of smoke still rise from the pile. Blood is shoving behind his eyes.
It is several minutes before he is calm enough to leave. Retracing his path through the corridors, he finds Rai’gy sitting on the wide staircase in the entrance hall, nursing his arm. From the pain rolling off him, it is broken. Kimmuriel nods to him, leaning for a moment upon the banister.
“Well?”
Kimmuriel shakes his head.
“Damn,” Rai’gy mutters. He turns his face up to the ceiling, neck clenched. “Damn it!”
Mercenaries below look their way, but seem unsurprised by the outburst.
“He used us,” Rai’gy goes on, in a furious hiss. “He used this mission for his own personal gain. Jarlaxle should disembowel him.”
“Jarlaxle is concerned with other matters now.” The energetic presence of Jarlaxle’s crystal tower buzzes through the walls of the house like an electrical storm. For the sake of keeping his anger contained, Kimmuriel tries to ignore it. “What is wrong with your arm?”
“I can’t do much for it. I’ve burned through all I have, I don’t think I—”
Kimmuriel sits on the step beside him. He is irritated with himself for the moment of indecision in the courtyard. They are allies in this: there is no latitude for doubt or faint-heartedness. As he sends a tendril of his power toward Rai’gy, his friend shifts, startled.
“Kimmuriel—”
“I will warn you,” Kimmuriel says, laying hands on his arm, “it is not my specialism.”
It is not. Psychobiology has always seemed to him quite useless; but that was before Jarlaxle placed them on the front line of a desperate daylight invasion. Tiredly he dredges up energy and pushes it into Rai’gy, knitting the slivers of bone tissue together as if they were cloth scraps. He is not accustomed to manipulating the bodies of others except to cause pain.
“Ah, much better,” Rai’gy says, straightening his arm a little at a time, his distress fading. “Impressive, I thought you couldn’t...”
“My first concern, always,” Kimmuriel says, blinking against the dark spots on his vision, “is that you are impressed.” The strength goes out of him for a moment and he sags forward, elbows on his knees.
“Your sense of humour appears at the strangest times, you know. Where’s your crystal?”
“Depleted.” He remembers pulling power from it as he rushed through the corridors. “I do not have—”
“Well, that puts you in the same boat as the rest of us. I don’t think I could even manage a cantrip at this point.” Rai’gy, rising, offers his hand, and Kimmuriel is pulled up to standing. “Although you do look extremely grey. If you’re about to fall over—”
“I shall endeavour to keep you informed.”
Following Rai’gy out into the central courtyard, Kimmuriel lifts his hand against the glare of sunlight. The sun has come down from its peak—it is late afternoon—but still an affront. He is woozy in the heat, sweat prickling on his neck.
Canvas has been strung between the walls, and their dead are being laid out in rows in the shade where the floor is clear of rubble. The human corpses lie in the sun, pale and bloating like puffball mushrooms. The smell is already quite putrid.
Eyes follow them as they go, and thoughts trail them like steam: images of himself with boulders rising in front of him, human soldiers running and scrambling to get away; admiration, gratitude, fear—
Rai’gy nudges him. “They’ve never seen you in close combat before.”
“It is not an experience I will hurry to repeat.” His heart is beating fast, and lurchingly; he can feel it in his throat, his face, his back.
“I think they’re all quite relieved you’re on our side,” Rai’gy says. “As am I.”
Under the canvas Berg’inyon is limping, his trouser leg soaked with blood. He offers them a loose salute, before turning to address one of his officers. “If they can be moved, get them inside.”
“Yessir.”
“Fucking traps,” he says as they approach. “Lost three men all at once, and I barely got out before another one detonated.”
“How many casualties?”
“Can’t say yet. Too many.” Berg’inyon’s expression grows more intense. “Where is he?”
“He did not leave the tower,” Kimmuriel says, and they all look up at the structure which now dominates the courtyard. It seems to vibrate, so sharp and bright is it in the light. “We were on the brink of disaster, and he did nothing—”
“Not quite nothing,” Rai’gy cuts in. “He nearly obliterated Soulez. That thing is—”
“Dangerous,” Kimmuriel says. “It is dangerous.” Cold and heat clash down the length of his spine; it seems paradoxical to be so hot in his skin, and yet feel chilled.
“On that point.” Rai’gy turns to Berg’inyon. “Healing is in very short supply. Make sure none of your men attempt to venture any further in—we won’t be able to do anything for them if they set off more traps.”
“Noted.” Berg’inyon hobbles away, barking for one of the officers. Rai’gy is intercepted by a healer who is radiating frustration.
Kimmuriel starts toward the shade. His teeth chatter. His surroundings are throbbing. Under cover, he sits down on a toppled pillar as the edges of his view begin to collapse.
“Lieutenant?” Footfalls, nearing. Then, further off: “Hey! Hey! He’s—”
He bends over, light-headed. His skin is creeping, sweaty, and he is beginning to feel the wound in his back, gouged and hot.
“Lieutenant?”
Kimmuriel looks up, and immediately regrets doing so. Vertigo spins the sky, the light horrible and too close. He cannot discern the face, but the mind is pushing stress at him.
“Shit—”
Footsteps; distress. A vial of a familiar colour is thrust in front of him. “Lieutenant, you should—” It slips in his clammy hand, but he manages to uncork it and drink the lot.
Presently, things become a little more solid. The wound in his back pinches, feeling tender. He is still holding the empty vial. Before him there are more, a small crate of them.
“Are you all right, lieutenant?”
“Yes.” He rakes away the strands of hair sticking to his face. “My thanks.”
He badly needs another; but their supply is finite and it would not be expedient, at this moment, to place his own comfort over the survival of his men. He must win their loyalty: that is paramount. And the company’s position here is vulnerable, with Jarlaxle’s tower shining like a beacon on the horizon from every balcony in Calimport. If the captured humans decide to resist—if reinforcements arrive—if there are defences in this house they have not yet suffered—
“Have the rest distributed,” he tells the soldier. “By greatest need. If anyone attempts to bribe or coerce you to do otherwise, send them to me.”
His own wound will heal as his power recovers. It will have to suffice.
“Yessir.”
Rai’gy steps into view, and gives a low whistle. “The back of your robe’s all blood. It looks like someone’s tried to cleave you clean in half.”
I watched a human gut you like a fish, Kimmuriel thinks. “A fortunate miss,” he says. “Humans cannot do anything properly.”
Chuckling, Rai’gy sits down on a barrel. They both look across the courtyard, watching the wounded being brought under cover. A mercenary cracks his sword hilt across a human’s head. Drow voices wind between the walls.
Rai’gy rubs dust from his eyes. “Gods, that was ridiculous.”
“Is this considered success?” Kimmuriel says.
“Who knows. It’s never felt like this, I can tell you that.”
Kimmuriel stares up at the tower. Hate is bubbling up in him. Are we worth so little to you? “There can be no doubt, at least, of who is to blame.”
The mood in Dallabad is vicious.
Before the attack, Dallabad’s force stood at over one hundred. Excessive for a fort of this size, Entreri thought—and useless, when the time came. Half are dead. The rest, groggy and stupid from the sleep-venom, are tied hand and foot and kneeling in the courtyard.
They’re guarded by Bregan D’aerthe mercenaries, who malinger in the shade of the walls and beneath the hanging canvas. The drow talk and smoke and eat dried meat, all in a state of weary agitation. They want more blood; they don’t understand why Jarlaxle is staying their hands. They’ll take any excuse.
One of the prisoners sways his body, leaning to whisper to another. Seeing this, a drow mercenary strides over and kicks him in the ribs. “Shut up!”
The humans don’t understand Drow, but the gist is obvious. This one struggles upright, then reels back and spits at his attacker. “Just kill us, you fucking bastards, don’t drag it out—”
Metal whines; the drow has drawn his sword. “You piece of shit—”
Entreri says in Drow, “I suggest you don’t do that.” He doesn’t give a damn about Soulez’s soldiers; but something will come to a head if Jarlaxle’s men start openly flouting his orders.
The drow rounds on him, mouth turned cruelly up. “Do you, human? Do you suggest—” Entreri’s Drow is proficient, which barely suffices for a language of such nuance and endless subtext. This man is mocking his pronunciation.
“Yes.” He turns to face the mercenary fully, letting him see the sword on his hip. The drow’s lips thin, and he shifts his weight back a fraction. “I do.”
Jarlaxle’s men are cocky, but this one, at least, doesn’t have a deathwish. They saw Entreri’s work when he was trapped in Menzoberranzan; they’ve been warned, and warned each other. And more than a few watched this sword burn Kohrin Soulez into fine ash not hours ago.
“If they give you trouble,” Entreri says, “knock them out. Jarlaxle wants them alive.”
“Thirty-eight dead.”
Jarlaxle blinks. He greeted them with a wide smile, full of energetic flourishes; but now he deflates. “Thirty-eight?”
“And ninety-six wounded.” Berg’inyon is trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Over two-thirds of our force are out of commission.”
It’s late afternoon when Jarlaxle summons his lieutenants—and Entreri—to the tower. The walls have turned to black quartz, sealing out the sun, and they stand together in the dim. The heat has barely begun to dissipate. Rai’gy looks weighed down with fatigue. Berg’inyon has spatters of dust-stuck blood on his armour and is keeping his weight off his left leg. Kimmuriel is absent.
“Healing supplies are being distributed,” Rai’gy says. “Adequate for twenty men, perhaps.”
“And the rest of the wounded?” Jarlaxle presses. “Have you the resources to heal them?” Entreri remembers Jarlaxle once moved to anger by the loss of a single mercenary. This is a muted reaction to the loss of thirty-eight.
“Not yet. Many of our—”
“Apologies.” A voice from the doorway. “I was waylaid.”
Entreri has seen plenty of dead drow in recent hours; Kimmuriel’s pallor isn’t far off.
“Come in,” Jarlaxle says. “We’ve barely begun.” He’s looking Kimmuriel over; his eyebrows rise.
Kimmuriel moves to stand at Rai’gy’s right. The back of his charcoal robe is blood-black from the top of his spine to his hip, and his hair is sloppy in its thick plait and chalky with red dust. Entreri sees him in the middle of the courtyard, hurling boulders like a child might skip stones.
“Many of our healers are among the wounded,” Rai’gy continues, “and the rest need to recover before they can cast again.”
“The enchantments weren’t enough to fully inhibit the sunlight,” Berg’inyon says, flatly.
“They worked as intended,” Kimmuriel cuts in. “Soulez was dispelling them as quickly as they could be cast, with…”
He casts a look at Entreri which could peel skin. “With this,” Entreri says, holding up the hand wearing the gauntlet. He isn’t ashamed. Kohrin Soulez is dead: to the victor the spoils. But he looks at Jarlaxle as he says it, and he keeps his voice flat, almost disinterested.
“Unfortunate that it was so effective,” Jarlaxle says. “Regrettable that we did not anticipate it better.” To Entreri, his uncovered eye has a hard glint. Then his attention swings back to his lieutenants. “But we must look to securing our position. Have you rounded up the remaining humans?”
Berg’inyon nods. “The fortress is secure.” As expected, Kimmuriel doesn’t volunteer information about the illithid.
Rai’gy clears his throat. “I wouldn’t say ‘secure’. The humans know what we are, and they—”
“That’s to our advantage.” Jarlaxle says. “It’ll keep them in line.”
“Until one of them decides to make it known in the city at large.”
“They will not,” Jarlaxle says, his uncovered eye suddenly fervent. He tucked the shard away when they entered, but his hand never strays far from it. “I will see to that.”
Berg’inyon’s face turns severe; he’s caught the reference. “As you will.”
“The humans will man the fortress—with limited oversight. This gain will serve us well.” Jarlaxle sets his hands on his hips, some of his energy revived. “Kimmuriel, open a circle in the lower levels. Begin dispatching half the troops back to the guildhouse.”
Kimmuriel’s posture tightens. He says quietly, “I cannot.”
Jarlaxle frowns. “Cannot? You’ve nothing left at all?”
“Nothing.”
This earns him a long look. “Rai’gy?”
Rai’gy gives a rueful shrug. “I’ve expended everything.”
“Another of the wizards, then, or—”
“They’re all empty,” Rai’gy says. “I couldn’t even find someone capable of sending a message back to our central holdings. We exhausted ourselves simply staying alive.”
It might be true. Kimmuriel looks unsteady, and Rai’gy little better. It was a narrow victory; the dead drow in the courtyard testify to that. But the longer the company is here, surrounded by men killed as a consequence of Jarlaxle’s decisions, the quicker anger will spread. The lieutenants know that.
“I see.” Jarlaxle glances between them. “There is no hurry, of course. Everything is in hand. Go and rest—there are rooms aplenty here, make yourselves comfortable. Berg’inyon, have the men quartered where you see fit. We will assess matters again shortly before dawn.”
As they leave, Entreri hears Rai’gy mutter something brief and sarcastic to Kimmuriel; no answer. He starts down the narrow, glittering staircase, and Kimmuriel’s gaze follows him like a nocked arrow.
The fortress falls into an uneasy quiet.
Entreri returns to Soulez’s chambers. The breeze has strewn ash across the floor and a sour, charred smell lingers. Leaning against the window, it affords him a view of the courtyard, where drow keep watch. Over the desert, the sun is setting. It lies red upon the expanse of crescent dunes, which are edged with lunettes of shadow. The blue mountains in the distance undulate like an ocean wave.
He lights a lamp and sits in a chair facing the locked golden doors, resting the sword across his knee. It would be idiotic to sleep here: acquiring the sword hasn’t gained him any favour, and Jarlaxle’s people are unsettled and malcontent.
His fingers tap against the pommel. Until now he hasn’t allowed himself to consider it, the stir in the back of his brain when he first touched it. This sword is violent. It’s an absurd thought—what is a weapon if not for violence?—but there’s a hunger in it, a terrific pull from the blade. It gnaws at him. Sooner or later, he’ll have to confront it.
Hours go by. Night draws in. His oil lamp is haunted by a white moth; as he watches it, he thinks of a rooftop, wine, and Jarlaxle’s smile. It seems a long time ago.
The left door swings open. A figure steps through.
Entreri sits up straighter. He’s struck then by a ringing déjà vu—the dark, the sway of robes, that face. He’s seen this before: almost the same, but not quite. There’s a realisation there, waiting in ambush. His sleep has been restless lately.
Hands clasped behind his back, Kimmuriel takes three slow paces forward. “Hail the conqueror.” He speaks quietly, but his voice is hot with hate.
“Homage isn’t necessary.”
A grimace. “Jarlaxle should have killed you where you stood.”
“But he didn’t.”
The heavy door shuts itself. The clunk of the lock falling into place is loud; it echoes. He suspects that Kimmuriel was lying to Jarlaxle; but not by much. He leans Charon’s Claw against the table. As Kimmuriel approaches, he rises.
Kimmuriel says, “I am sure you think yourself clever.”
“I think I’ve demonstrated as much—wouldn’t you agree?”
“You have demonstrated that you have a death wish. Jarlaxle does not like traitors.”
“What have I betrayed? Our reasons for capturing this place remain the same. Or would you rather Jarlaxle had set his sights on a guildhouse in the middle of Calimport?”
“You endangered this entire endeavour.”
Entreri shrugs. “Ahdahnia won’t bear us any ill will—not when her father would have tossed her away for a sword. She’s prepared to work with us. Jarlaxle’s tower can remain in place, without alerting the caleph that his city is being swarmed by drow.”
“While you claim the spoils for yourself.”
“Mutual benefit,” Entreri corrects. “As Jarlaxle is fond of saying.” Not mutual, of course. If the gauntlet works as hoped, Kimmuriel is now vulnerable—and so is Rai’gy, and every other wretched arcanist in Bregan D’aerthe’s ranks. Even Jarlaxle, if it comes to that.
Kimmuriel steps between the nearby table and couch, within arm’s reach now. His face is crisp in the lamplight: beautiful, in a way that annihilates itself in the mind, compelling you to look again. A trap well-laid, with sharp teeth.
“It does not matter what artefacts you steal,” Kimmuriel says. “It does not matter what allies you gather, what holes you hide in—”
“Angry, are you, that you were duped.”
“Duped?” The sound Kimmuriel makes can’t be called a laugh. “You saw that sword so utterly consume Soulez that it burned the flesh from him. And now you believe you can wield it?”
“Soulez was arrogant and stupid.”
“Then you will likely meet the same end.”
He raises his right hand in warning, fingers bending into a fist. “From whom? You?”
Kimmuriel’s gaze flicks between Entreri’s face and the gauntlet, and that look is a vitriolic yes. His lips part as if he might bare his teeth. But no lash of energy comes, nor is there anything slinking about Entreri’s thoughts. Entreri has no sense of him at all.
Then he’s pushed, flat hands driving into his chest, and his back meets the nearest pillar. He could resist, but he doesn’t: a sense of inevitability has caught and held him. The thing between them is like a saltpeter bomb, and none of this is a surprise.
Black, humorous despair tugs at the muscles of his mouth. “This is ridiculous,” he says.
Kimmuriel shudders, and turns up his face. “This is intolerable.” He looks smaller—more real. There’s a cut which edges his lip, and the veins stand bright in his eyes. Sweat shines in the hollow of his throat. Entreri wants to touch his mouth and his smooth, dark skin. He wants to stick a knife into his neck.
Kimmuriel leans in very near. His eyes are like embers. “I am not afraid of you.” Low, fierce.
A hot flush spreads through Entreri’s belly. “And yet you feel the need to say so.”
“We have suffered you too long. I have—”
“Have you.”
Gods, Kimmuriel is close enough to smell, and he smells of blood. Every breath shakes him a little.
“I told you that I’d had my fill of empty threats,” Entreri says. “From you, most of all.”
“I assure you, they are not.”
“You’re nothing but a thug. What will you do now that you can’t threaten me?”
Something in Kimmuriel’s face snaps like a cut wire. Then his hand claws into the neck of Kimmuriel’s robes—to haul him in, to keep him at bay—and Kimmuriel’s mouth crushes against his.
His mind gapes. He can’t think; he is all feeling. Kimmuriel’s open mouth drags against his lips, breathy and inexpert. It’s awful: too hard, too slick, too intimate; his spine stirs with sick excitement. He should be better than this. He should not need it: not from anyone, and this man least of all.
There’s something naïve and mimicked about the way Kimmuriel’s teeth part around his lower lip; how Kimmuriel’s tongue slides over his, wet and hot. He pushes his hands into Kimmuriel’s hair, snaring his fingers in the soft, thick plait, and his palms follow the curve of Kimmuriel’s skull. He imagines cracking this beautiful, diabolical head against the pillar like an egg.
Kimmuriel breaks off, gasping. “You are vermin,” he says. “You are beneath me—”
“Say that again,” Entreri breathes. “And this time mean it.”
“Be quiet—” They lunge again at each other.
Entreri has crossed regions of war; he’s seen how soldiers behave after battle. They drink themselves sick and gamble away their wages and fuck any warm body that will have them, out of a ferocious, terrified relief at being alive. Kimmuriel has the look of someone who only hours ago believed he might be killed in a hot trap of dust and iron. The body is an animal, even if it houses a razorous intellect.
He lets his hands drag in Kimmuriel’s robe. It’s been a long time; he’s fogged with it, his insides thrumming. He can almost forget who this is: Kimmuriel is just a body pressed against him, slim and warm and breathing fast, lips parting when Entreri touches the slope of his waist and the peaks of his hipbones through the silk. The raised embroidery—sigils of some kind—fizzes with static against his palms.
He’s no longer being held against the pillar. Kimmuriel has reached behind his own back. Heat froths in Entreri’s chest when he realises what Kimmuriel is doing. Then the sash sails down to the floor.
Kimmuriel's arms drop to his sides as his robe falls open. He’s stiff; he seems taken aback by his own daring. His under-robe shows in the gap, a deep slash of pale grey silk, and it’s like a red flag waving, an incitement; there’s nothing to be done but to take his mouth again and pull the outer robe from his shoulders. As he twists, shedding one sleeve and then the other, Entreri sees the back of his under-garment, which is stiff and gory. From the way blood has clotted in the silk, it’s not difficult to surmise where the the wound was.
“A glancing blow,” Kimmuriel breathes. Hardly. A few inches left and it would have cut his spine in half. “How disappointed you must be.”
“Surprised,” Entreri says, “that you bleed red, rather than black.”
It’s an insult used among drow nobility: ‘black-blood’, implying one too many demons in the family tree. He heard it once used about House Oblodra—its location on the edge of the Clawrift invited that kind of talk. Kimmuriel stiffens. “You insolent—”
The room doesn’t shake. The air is still. He was right: Kimmuriel is very depleted; this is all bluff and arrogance.
“You don’t seem to understand your position,” Entreri says. “Think carefully—about what you do next.”
“Do not—” Rage flickers Kimmuriel’s cheek. “Do not threaten me.”
The column of Entreri’s sternum feels hot, like metal thrust long enough into open flame that it starts to glow. He shoulders Kimmuriel roughly against the pillar; slams him against it when he tries to resist. Then he takes the silky length of Kimmuriel’s hair in his fist and pulls. Head yanked backward, Kimmuriel’s chin tips up, baring his neck. The top of his chest shudders up and down, up and down.
With the gauntlet, Entreri traces his jawline from ear to chin, gauging the response. Kimmuriel doesn’t struggle, but his throat moves violently once like he might gag. “Remove your hand—”
“Do you fear it,” Entreri says.
“No.” Kimmuriel’s eyes are very red, striated with gold. “Remove your hand—”
Entreri doesn’t try to control his sneer. “Can you not make me?”
In answer, something cracks against his ribcage like a mallet. He coughs, winded—it’s enough to bruise, not crack ribs—and Kimmuriel breaks away, listing heavily against the pillar. Not quite harmless, then.
They straighten at the same time.
“Why?” Kimmuriel’s voice cracks. His braid has come undone. The sight of him is a shock: the most rigid and imperious creature Entreri has ever met, stripped down to his trousers and under-robe, with his unbound hair swaying over his shoulders. He doesn’t look like an implacable weapon. He looks like a man gasping for air before the next wave pours over his head. “Why are you—”
“What.” Of all things, Entreri doesn’t expect Kimmuriel to advance on him.
“A human should not be—”
He doesn’t expect the hard bite to his lower lip, nor the tug at the buckle across his chest. He doesn’t expect Kimmuriel to back him toward the couch. Kimmuriel breathes, “You should not be…” As if he is trying to reason through something; but there’s no reason in this.
Entreri is pushed down. There’s ash under his hand.
One of House Oblodra’s notable unorthodoxies was a disdain for ‘flesh-pleasures’, as his sister once dubbed it. House doctrine accepted only one purpose for sex: the furthering of the bloodline. In truth Kimmuriel’s relatives were no more chaste than the Menzoberranyr nobility at large; but as a consequence Kimmuriel’s education in the subject was late, partial, and euphemistic.
During his adolescence, he was instructed that if he showed promise as a psion, he would be expected to serve the women of the House. The word was strange, serve; he did not fully comprehend its meaning until days later, when he asked Izyr what was meant by it.
“Not very long from now, you will be mature. When that time comes, if you are considered to be the proper stock, you will be required to make yourself available to any women of the House who are not immediately related to you by blood, for their use.”
“Use?”
“One of them may petition the matron mother to take you as a consort. In that case, you will be reserved for her use exclusively.”
Instead of answering his questions about what might be entailed in this variety of servitude, Izyr wrote a shelfmark on a piece of parchment. This led Kimmuriel to a manual of instruction for young noblemen about the proper conduct for a consort, which despite its austere trappings contained language Kimmuriel had only heard in others’ private and secretive thoughts. Much of what was described was violent and degrading. There were frank, cold illustrations of men in contorted or humiliated positions.
“What have you concluded?” Izyr asked him, as though it were a treatise on autohypnosis they were discussing.
“It is barbaric. I will not be—”
“Kimmuriel.” Izyr did not often visibly anger; but his demeanour then was terrible. “You are what they wish you to be. Do you understand?”
Mutinous, outraged, Kimmuriel’s voice rose as he said, “I am a scholar. I am not a thing.”
He was punished for that.
They did not speak of it again for several decades. Kimmuriel’s ability grew apace—faster than he had anticipated, faster than he could strictly control. Left to his own devices, his time was given to one experiment after another in which he was both subject and observer: hypothesising, testing, refining. There was no reason to hurry; and yet he felt an urgency which did not abate, a rising sense of danger.
In his eighty-sixth year he was brought before the matron mother. K’yorl, it seemed, had belatedly remembered that she had a third son, and that he was the family’s only living prospect.
As he stood there, Kimmuriel pushed all of it down, everything that he was, crushing it ruthlessly, making himself blank and dull; psionically inert. “It is regrettable,” he said, “that I have no great talent. I do not wish to disappoint the matron mother.”
Empty and unremarkable. The very sort K’yorl would not want to sully her bloodline. He received no offers of the position of consort, no particular interest from the other nobles of his House. K’yorl executed her patron and sought another, one who would not yield useless sons. Kimmuriel went back to his work, resigned to low, slow self-poisoning.
At the age of ninety-eight, he made a mistake. An experiment went awry, and in his desperation to keep the discharged energy from blasting his rooms apart, he manifested a reversion of such magnitude that it rang through the House like a great bell tolling. The matron mother—the only other Oblodran who might be capable of this feat—was not in the House at the time, but he knew she would be informed of the anomaly.
That evening he left the House in secret, and went to an apothecary.
Gallroot was a crude solution. Unpleasant. The first time he drank it the pain caused him to hallucinate filaments of light, streaming, flashing; and moving his head was not unlike being slapped.
Nevertheless, it was effective. The family convened the next morning to discuss the occurrence—or rather, were summoned by the matron mother and interrogated one by one while the rest looked on. When K’yorl reached into him, he was as empty as the pit below their feet.
He said, “I regret that I have nothing more to offer you, matron mother.”
His mother took his face in one hand and tipped it up, like a jewel-smith looking for a seam of something worthy in a lump of granite.
“Such a shame,” she said.
Upon returning to his quarters, he saw himself reflected in the glass pane he used for ectoplasmic refraction. His face was ashy, his eyes reddened but full of a grim, ferocious satisfaction. I am not a thing. I will not be used.
The divan is crimson; colour swims before him. He cannot muster any energy to augment the effort of his tired arms, but Entreri bends his knees and goes down willingly, looking up with such intensity that Kimmuriel could almost believe he is not the only psion here.
Entreri has not taken off the glove.
He sets a knee beside Entreri’s hip, the skirt of his robe pooling around him. This time Entreri’s lips open under his and it is wet and urgent, full of breathing. For all that he has experienced secondhand—truly it is legion, the wandering filth of other minds—to feel it with his own body is different. Intensity sweeps him along: Entreri’s hands are in his untied hair, Entreri’s tongue is in his mouth, and it is good. It is taboo, it is unnatural, it is base and forbidden to him; and, damningly, he does not stop.
Now and again Entreri’s mind strains and recoils; that is all Kimmuriel can discern. He tries to draw out a little energy to fret at the fastenings on Entreri’s armour, but pain needles through his head. He has scraped out even his last reserves; it will be some minutes before he can bring anything forth, and his sensitivity is so blunted that the fortress beyond this room sounds void of life. Swallowing his alarm, he begins to unbuckle Entreri’s brigandine in menial fashion. Their heads stay close, and Entreri sweeps the curtain of his hair over his shoulder and bites at the skin under his ear. He shudders all over, swaying forward as Entreri’s hands knead at his shoulders and grope down to his ribs. Heat soaks through his inner robe. Entreri touches him as though he is extremely sharp, a cutting edge.
In the space of a minute they loosen the several components of Entreri’s armour. Entreri pushes himself up, demonstrating that Kimmuriel’s hold upon him is naught, and wrestles them off. Possessed by hunger which only seems to increase the more it is fed, Kimmuriel watches himself unbutton a human’s under-shirt as though it is not profane and disgusting to do so. He thinks of how his boots sank into scalding red sand in the desert. It is like that, to touch him.
The skin under his fingertips has a grain like warm wood. It is pale: brown, not dark grey or black. In places the hair gives it a faint downy texture; scars criss-cross all over like eccentric stitching. When Kimmuriel thumbs a ridged scar above his navel Entreri tenses, which deepens the divots of muscle in his stomach. This body is a weapon; Kimmuriel feels something coil tight in his belly. He has not forgotten watching Entreri fight Drizzt, nor how easily he suppressed the assassin in the sewers. A way of moving which should only be possible with magic.
Entreri yanks at the ties of his inner robe and it comes open. He is so very hot, and the night air licks, cooler, against his chest. Before he can regret the lack of even a thin layer, Entreri touches his bare waist, hands dragging down over his hips above his trousers, and his skin hums. He has never been touched like this. He did not know. Many things he did not know.
“You are disgusting,” he breathes. “You are—” He is trembling. The hot, heavy feeling in his body grows.
The room overturns; he is on his back, with Entreri on top of him. His wound throbs. Entreri’s knee presses down on his thigh and his left wrist is pinned to the cushions by Entreri’s gloved right hand. Panic squeezes his throat: he can see that vile sword leaned nearby; he cannot see Entreri’s jewelled knife.
“Say it again.” Entreri’s lips are close. They look red and bitten. “Convince me.” His pupils blacken his grey eyes. Shadows draw his fine cheekbones, the lines of his nose.
Kimmuriel’s pulse crashes like whitewater in his ears. He struggles up, getting his elbow under him, and their mouths clash together again. He hears himself groan. His fingernails sink into the round of Entreri’s shoulder, pulling him down. Against his Entreri’s mind buzzes, hot; it emits feeling like electrical sparks: lips, teeth, slickness, the tongue over his tongue and in his mouth and his other mouth—
He can smell himself and Entreri, their sweat and the dust. It tugs him back to the courtyard; the sun, his stinging eyes. He is so tired that lying down spins his head, yet his body feels wound tight, hooks and strings through his innards. It is insanity to want anything so badly—to want a human, a thing not deserving of crawling at his feet—and to lack the control to stop himself or hold it back. To have studied and trained for a hundred years, only to crumble here.
Entreri palms his thigh with a rough hand, drawing them together. The swell of his cock pushes between Kimmuriel’s thighs, and Kimmuriel arches. There is an ache down the centre of him: his trousers are too snug and his hips want to move. He scrabbles his heel through the bedclothes. Grabbing at his lower back, his spread legs, his ass, Entreri rocks into him, and jerkily they are moving, he is moving, rubbing himself against Entreri; it is shameful and he cannot stop. Sensation is being dug out of his body, caverns and recesses he did not know were there. Were every aspect of this not loathsome, he would be fascinated by his capacity for it.
“Ah—” He is making shameful, helpless noises; he cannot stop that either, short of gagging himself. He is cramped and sweltering, and the humidity between their skin makes him sweat. He hooks his foot around Entreri’s calf, straining for purchase. Need is overtaking him; he thinks of a pendulum, a drum, and then the senseless crashing of water, before it swells in him and he lets his head fall back and his spine bend up so far he thinks it will snap—
“Do you know why we forbid it?”
“Because it dulls us,” he repeated to his tutor. Izyr was unusually stern that day.
“The body is a trap for the mind, Kimmuriel. A trap. If you cannot transcend it, you will be no better than the mundane creatures, than the filth in the Stenchstreets. A psion who cannot control himself is akin to a feral dog.”
“I understand.”
“You are better. You must be better, or you will be nothing—do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes, I understand—”
But Izyr died disappointed, believing that his prized student had amounted after all to naught. Weak, a failure, capable of nothing.
“No,” Kimmuriel gasps. “No—”
Energy cracks against Entreri’s palm.
For a moment he’s holding it, a spitting mass which seems to be getting only hotter and more volatile. His hand shakes. With no conscious thought, he lashes his arm out sideways and the energy careens off, smashing into a table. It explodes. Wood shards scatter across the room and he ducks, covering his face as splinters batter against his arms. The body under him flinches and is gone.
Tucking a foot under himself, Entreri draws his dagger from his discarded belt. At the same time Kimmuriel reappears several feet away, stumbling out of thin air. “Do not—” A slug of blood runs from his nose.
Wood-dust and ash lie all over the floor. The couch is strewn with splinters. The giddy smeariness of arousal is giving way to cold, sour aftershock.
With shaking hands, Kimmuriel wraps his under-robe around himself and ties it. His dark grey robe lifts from the floor, followed by the black stroke of his sash. They flit over to him like ghosts and wrap around his body. He knots the sash. He’s a shadow against the window, with his hair cold silver and his luminous eyes and blood glistening on his face. He has never looked so unhinged.
“You do not speak of this.”
Entreri lets his mouth contort into something between a snarl and a grin. “Who would I tell?” he says, but Kimmuriel's footsteps are already sounding away in the corridor.
He sits on the couch and runs a hand through his hair. It’s full of splinters. He laughs to himself, bitterly, and reaches for his shirt. Things will move quickly now, he thinks.
The moon is high. In a tower room full of dovecotes, the roosting pigeons coo and fuss in their sleep. Soulez was too paranoid to trust arcanists with his messages. Entreri grinds an ink-stick, wets a quill, and begins to write.
From the house of Kohrin Soulez: greetings.
The master of Dallabad is no more. I consider this venture a success; my allies may disagree.
You asked me to tell you about them. The next time I see you, I will.
—AE.
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